A court has thrown out an appeal by Daphne Caruana Galizia’s heirs -  for former Labour minister Chris Cardona to pay a penalty for issuing ‘malicious’ garnishee orders against the journalist and then failing to produce evidence to support his libel claims.

The appeal court ruled that the heirs’ appeal did not hold up legally because the garnishee warrant was no longer in effect when they made the penalty claim. 

The legally complex issue stemmed from two precautionary garnishee warrants - worth €46,000 - which Cardona filed in February 2017 against Caruana Galizia whom he was suing for defamation over her stories about his alleged visit to a brothel in Velbert whilst on an official trip to Germany.

Soon after the warrants were issued, the journalist asked the court to revoke them claiming they were malicious.

Her request was rejected. 

In October 2017 the journalist was killed in a car bomb explosion metres away from her Bidnija home.

The libel cases were dropped in 2018 at the request of the family after Cardona seemed to have lost interest in the case. Cardona had three months to reignite them but did not.

He told the court that this was because, at the time, there was a lot of local and international pressure by the media.

Meanwhile, her husband and sons, who took over her role as defendants in the various cases that Caruana Galizia had been defending in court, filed a civil action against Cardona.

Their claim was based on article 836(8) of the Code of Organization and Civil Procedure which states that a person targeted by a court warrant may ask the court to impose a penalty upon the person issuing that warrant if certain legal grounds existed.

The heirs argued that after filing two libel cases against the journalist, Cardona had failed to produce evidence to support his claims. Therefore, the garnishee warrants and the libel proceedings were instituted in a malicious, frivolous and vexatious manner and thus Cardona ought to be condemned to pay a penalty, argued the applicants.

Cardona rebutted by means of several pleas, one of which stated that the subject matter of the case was res judicata, namely that the issue had already been decided upon definitively.

The Magistrates’ Court upheld the argument since the issue had been decided when the court turned down the journalist’s request to declare the warrants malicious, back in 2017.

The heirs appealed but Cardona argued that the law did not allow them to make the penalty claim because the warrants were no longer in effect.  

Mr Justice Lawrence Mintoff upheld this argument.