Updated with further details at 2.15pm.

A court has asked police to investigate claims that ex-OPM official Neville Gafà attempted to bribe witnesses to stop them testifying in a medical visa scam libel case that he lost on Monday.

Gafà lost two libel suits against The Malta Independent on Sunday over stories implicating him in the alleged racket back in 2014.

The stories, published in August 2016, claimed that a “Government official was netting up to €150,000 a month in medical visa scam” and “Receipts show €35,000 in payments made to Gafà by Libyan middleman.”

The claims revolved around allegations made by twelve Libyan nationals, all casualties of the civil war, that the former government official, who introduced himself as “an agent of health of Malta”, had demanded money for treatment.

At the time, the Maltese government had offered free treatment to casualties of the Libyan civil war.

Yet Gafà was allegedly charging patients a monthly fee of some €2,500 to secure medical visas, treatment and accommodation, along with an additional €100 charge.

Offered money not to testify

Throughout the libel proceedings filed by Gafà against the newspaper’s former editor David Lindsay, five of those men testified via Skype about their ordeal. 

They claimed further that Gafà had subsequently travelled to Libya and offered them money so as not to testify against him in a case concerning the alleged medical visas racket. 

When delivering judgment on Monday in the libel proceedings the court, presided over by Magistrate Victor George Axiak threw out Gafà’s claims, upholding the respondent’s pleas of truth and fair comment.

Moreover, the court recommended that the Police Commissioner investigate the allegations made by the witnesses about Gafà’s attempts to “buy their silence.”

Having said that the court pointed out that this did not mean that there was sufficient evidence from a criminal law aspect to allege that Gafà was embroiled in bribery.

Such a matter was to be assessed before the appropriate court and until there was a final decision in criminal proceedings, the applicant was to be considered innocent, the court said. 

Transcripts of a number of Libyans claiming that they bought visas from Gafa’, along with other documents detailing the alleged racket, formed part of a dossier compiled and presented in court by Ivan Grech Mintoff.

Gafa’ himself testified that as project manager at the Health Ministry at the time, his role was to coordinate with the ministry and the Immigration Commission to set in motion the process of transferring injured civilians from Libya to Malta for treatment.

The court was also presented with evidence of text messages exchanged via Viber between Gafa’ and the Libyan whistleblower, Khaled Ben Nasan.

Gafa’ had answered Ben Nasan’s messages, not once as claimed, but more than once, without denying the other man’s reference to the sum of €37,800 that was to be reimbursed for medical visas which had not been issued.

That fact could not be ignored, said Magistrate Axiak.

The ‘sting of the libel’ stemmed from allegations that Gafa’ had exploited his position to illegally pocket money by taking bribes to secure the granting of medical visas to Libyan nationals, said the court.

But the court upheld the defendant’s plea of fair comment since there was no doubt that the stories concerned matters of public interest and “a subject about which the public truly ought to have a legitimate concern.”

When all was considered the defendant had managed to prove that the allegations “which go to the pith and substance of the matter” were substantially true, declared the court.

Lawyer Peter Fenech assisted the defendant.