Court confirms Manuel Delia libel win against academic Simon Mercieca

A court of appeal has confirmed that University academic Simon Mercieca defamed activist and columnist Manuel Delia with two blogposts carried on his website in July 2023.

The case was filed after Mercieca claimed that Delia had deliberately scuppered a deal to transfer the Mediterranean Film Studios in Kalkara to Keith Schembri in 2007. He claimed Delia, then chief of staff to former minister Austin Gatt, had acted unethically and in a mafia-like manner by sabotaging the film studio negotiations out of “greed.” He further described Delia as a hypocrite, given his current role as a civil society activist with the NGO Repubblika.

The Magistrates' court had found that Mercieca’s allegations were false and seriously damaging to Delia’s reputation. The claims did not amount to fair comment or public interest. 

It awarded €1,000 in moral damages for defamation and imposed an additional €300 penalty for failure to comply properly with the right of reply.

Mercieca appealed.

The Court of Appeal in its inferior jurisdiction observed that before Mercieca published the Right of Reply, he wrote another article to attack Delia and used excerpts of Delia’s reply to convince his blog readers that he was factually correct in his assertions.

“This is not freedom of expression, this is abuse,” Mr Justice Lawrence Mintoff said.

In the judgement, the court observed that in the second blogpost preceding the Right of Reply, Mercieca wrote: “[u]nfortunately, how Manuel Delia and his team conducted the entire negotiations is worth turning into a mafia film. The mafia works and conducts its business just like Delia.”

The Court of Appeal said that this was not “freedom of expression” and Mercieca used parts of the replies to try and give an impression that Delia’s reply substantiated his original writing.

“This is clearly not what the legislator had in mind when legislating for a Right of Reply,” the court said, adding that the provision was aimed at having a remedy to correct misrepresentations in published writing.

Mercieca also claimed that his articles were an “honest opinion”. The Court of Appeal disagreed, noting that for this defence to succeed the original publication needed to be an opinion piece in the first place.

However, the article framed the content as “facts”, using actual facts and mixing them with something the author had been told.

“An honest opinion is not formed by resting on one source and one needs research to form an opinion,” the court said, reiterating that Mercieca did not express an opinion but presented, as a fact, that a person was corrupt and had a suspicious past. 

“The court holds that no person should be described as corrupt or mafia-like on the basis of hearsay,” Mr Justice Lawrence Mintoff said, especially when it involves individuals such as this who previously served as a government official and was presently a rule of law activist advocating for more transparency and accountability.

“Once one’s reputation is tarnished by such allegations and assertions, anything that the appellate says will be doubted,” the court said.

It also observed that Mercieca has a following and was a history professor at the University of Malta. There was a tendency that the ordinary reader would take what he said to be the truth.

“It is expected that a person with such an academic profile does the necessary verifications before publishing stories,” the court held, adding that alleging that a person was corrupt or motivated by greed was nothing but an attempt to tarnish a reputation.

It therefore dismissed Mercieca’s appeal and ordered him to pay the court expenses.

Lawyers Andrew Borg Cardona, Eve Borg Costanzi and Matthew Cutajar represented Delia. Lawyer William Cuschieri appeared for Mercieca.