The Court of Appeal, presided over by Chief Justice Vincent de Gaetano, last week confirmed a First Hall judgement which imposed a Lm1,000 fine on former Labour Minister Joe Grima for comments he had expressed on Professor Joe Pirotta who at that time was the chairman of the Broadcasting Authority.

The case dates back to October 1994 and a talk show on radio Live FM with the participation of Mr Grima, who was the owner of the radio, and Dr Emmy Bezzina as chatshow host.

In October 2005, the First Hall had condemned Mr Grima to pay Lm1,000 and costs and Dr Bezzina to pay Lm50 and to publish an apology. But Mr Grima appealed the sentence.

The context of the October 1994 talk show was the liberalisation of the TV broadcasting sector. Mr Grima, on behalf of his company Grima Communications, had applied for a TV broadcasting licence.

In the broadcast he poured invectives on Professor Pirotta. He called him mazetta who “does not understand anything”, vavu, stupid, ignorant, worthy of being insulted. He claimed that the Broadcasting Authority was the poodle of those in power and that its members would personally pay for the rape they were doing to the sector.

He also added that the authority was responsible for the biggest scandal in the country because to test frequencies it associated itself with a company that had brought equipment illegally into Malta thus becoming a partner in crime.

Mr Grima’s thrust was that the Broadcasting Authority was treating his company differently from how it treated the Labour Party and thus was being discriminatory.

In his testimony, Prof. Pirotta testified that the authority had issued Grima Communications with a letter of intent, in which was qualified that it still required an examination of the applicant’s financial strength.

Mr Grima had mentioned an Austrian bank but when asked for clearance so that the authority could contact the bank and get confirmation of the information Mr Grima had given it, such clearance never came.

Mr Grima charged that the authority had favoured the Labour Party in its allocation of the sole licence on offer when the Labour Party was in the same position as the six other applicants, including Grima Communications.

Charles Mizzi, then an authority board member, testified that it was not an issue of two companies – Rainbow Productions (Labour) and Grima Communications – competing for one frequency. Grima Communications had not satisfied the conditions laid down by the authority, so it was not given a licence. Dominic Fenech, another authority board member, testified that Super One got the licence because it satisfied the required criteria while Grima Communications had failed in its financial aspects. The same was confirmed by Lino Mintoff, another authority board member.

Mr Grima had further claimed that MLP had accepted a defective frequency while he was not allowed to do test transmissions while MLP was allowed. However, according to Prof. Pirotta Grima Communications could not do test transmissions because it did not have a licence.

Prof. Pirotta added that in his time as Broadcasting Authority chairman, from 1993 onwards, he had never been contacted by Prime Minister Eddie Fenech Adami in any way to influence his or the authority’s decisions.

As regards the Nationalist Party’s television station, this satisfied all the requirements. Both Prof. Pirotta and Antoine Ellul testified that whenever unlicensed transmissions were made, even by Rainbow Productions or by Multicomm, the authority had informed the police.

The Court of Appeal turned down each of the 10 reasons Mr Grima adduced in his appeal and confirmed the original judgement, with costs against Mr Grima.

The lengthy court proceedings and the various meanderings of the case not only took so long but also ran into at least a file of some 730 pages, the court noted.