The editor of l-orizzont, Josef Caruana, was ordered by a court to pay €5,000 in damages after he was found guilty of defaming PBS CEO Anton Attard and former head of news Natalino Fenech in an article published on 2 October, 2012.

The two were awarded €2,500 each.

The case was instituted by both Mr Attard and Mr Fenech on May 31 last year after Mr Caruana published the article entitled ‘Is-Saltna tal-Gideb’.

After having considered all the evidence, the court found the article to be defamatory and libelous.

Mr Fenech and Mr Attard particularly complained about a paragraph in the article which stated that the two had pocketed millions in consultancies and had bank accounts in the Caribbean, Cyprus and in the Pacific and that one of former prime minister Lawrence Gonzi’s (referred to in the article as Gonzi PN) weapons at the time was PBS made up of a gang of five, that is Mr Attard, Mr Fenech, Pierre Portelli, Lou Bondi and Peppi Azzopardi.

The article also stated that the clique had turned the station into the Maltese version of ‘TeleKabul’. The article was signed ‘Cikku l-Poplu’.

The court rejected the argument of the defence that the comments were fair and this due to the way the article described the five people mentioned above, which made them look more like a criminal gang then people involved in the media.

Terms such as serial liars were also used in the article and the article likened them to Goebbels, who was Adolf Hitler's minister of propaganda.