‘Defamation cases should not be inherited’ – Matthew Caruana Galizia

Assassinated journalist Daphne Caruana Galizia’s son, Matthew Caruana Galizia, said that it is “almost impossible” for him to defend a libel case in his mother’s name “unless I am in church and a box of evidence falls from heaven” during a court sitting on Monday afternoon.

Caruana Galizia was called to court in libel proceedings opened by disgraced former prime minister Joseph Muscat against his mother for a story she published in 2017 just months before she was assassinated.

Speaking to The Shift after the hearing, Matthew Caruana Galizia said that “defamation cases should not be inherited” given that he does not have access to the evidence and thinking his mother had in relation to the article.

Daphne Caruana Galizia’s story claimed that Egrant, a company set up in Panama, was owned by Michelle Muscat, the former prime minister’s wife. Panama is known for its lack of transparency in company structure and favourable taxation systems for offshore companies.

Magistrate Aaron Bugeja had conducted an inquiry into the allegations and found that while he could not determine who owned Egrant, Nexia BT, the company that set up the offshore structures, contained documentation of “suspicious transactions, concealed corporate relationships, and other indicators of probable money laundering and sanction evading activities”.

Following the inquiry’s conclusions, Bugeja also called for Maria Efimova, the Pilatus Bank source for Caruana Galizia’s story, to be charged with slander. Notably, he also called for the investigation of Nexia BT’s Karl Cini.

Matthew Caruana Galizia said that the case was prejudiced against him, given that he did not have access to what his mother knew or thought when publishing the story. His comments echoed those made by the Council of Europe calling the practice “unacceptable” in a 2020 report.

Press freedom organisation Reporters Without Borders (RSF) has described the cases as an “extensive abuse” of Malta’s defamation law, with the murdered journalists’ family at one point facing almost 30 cases.

In 2019, Caoilfhionn Gallagher, an international human rights lawyer and expert in journalists’ safety and media freedom from Doughty Street Chambers had called on the British government in her role as a barrister to “condemn” the same posthumous suits, describing them as being used to silence journalists and the “chilling effect” it has on journalism in Malta.

Matthew Caruana Galizia was himself also facing libel proceedings, as Muscat sued him following the publication of a Facebook post that Caruana Galizia said: “was aimed at explaining how money laundering works”.

Of the almost 30 cases opened against the Caruana Galizia family, eight are still ongoing. Four of the remaining cases were originally opened against Daphne Caruana Galizia, with the family having no access to her original sources or thoughts given that the murdered journalist kept her sources’ confidentiality.

Matthew Caruana Galizia said that these sources “were high-level officials who would contact her”, which she would protect given that “her sense of ethics was very strong.

“She would not publish anything without solid evidence. She had a strong sense of ethics.”