Yorgen Fenech’s lawyers have been cleared of trying to bribe a journalist after the magistrate responsible for the case said that the Attorney General’s office had failed to specify the relevant type of bribery.
The judgement was delivered on Monday in the case involving lawyers Gianluca Caruana Curran and Charles Mercieca who were accused of trying to bribe Times of Malta journalist Ivan Martin.
Martin had testified that Caruana Curran attempted to give him a folded roll of notes after a meeting between him and the two lawyers in Valletta in November 2020. Caruana Curran on his part admitted that he had offered “remuneration” but that this was only because he had never dealt with a journalist before and wasn’t sure what to do.
In her judgement on the case, Magistrate Natasha Galea Sciberras said that while the lawyers had been charged with active bribery and that the compilation of evidence was set out in such a manner by the prosecution to reflect these charges, the Attorney General had indicated a different provision of law – one which concerned passive bribery in the private sector – in its note for referral.
In effect, active corruption can be defined as a person paying or promising to pay a bribe, while passive corruption concerns any person who is soliciting or accepting such a bribe.
In this case, the only person who could have feasibly been charged with passive corruption could have been Ivan Martin himself, but the judgement acknowledged and specified that Martin had refused any offer of money made to him and that the prosecution from the beginning had no intention to charge him in relation to the case.
The court said that because it was clear that no crime related to passive corruption had occurred, it is inconceivable that the accused could be considered as being complicit in such a crime.
Because the note of referral on the case based itself on passive bribery, the court said that in the circumstances it did not consider it necessary to make ulterior considerations than those already made.
With the above procedural errors in mind, the court cleared the two lawyers of the charges brought against them.
Giannella de Marco and Stephen Tonna Lowell appeared for Caruana Curran and Mercieca as defence counsel.