KUALA LUMPUR – The Federal Court has dismissed a defamation suit by Hindraf leader P. Waytha Moorthy against his former colleague in the rights movement, N. Ganesan.
The apex court was of the view that the two questions posed by Waytha during the appeal need not be answered.
This was due to the fact that the two questions were not brought in the Court of Appeal during the first stage of review, thus the Federal Court could not answer “questions that are in vacuum”.
Waytha was then ordered to pay RM30,000 in costs to respondent Ganesan.
Waytha had served as a minister in the Prime Minister’s Department in charge of national unity and social wellbeing from May 2018 to February 2020.
Initially, Waytha sued Tamil Nesan and Ganesan on July 15, 2016, at the Seremban High Court over an article the Tamil newspaper published on March 13 that year.
However, in Ganesan’s statement of defence dated September 9, 2016, he denied all allegations of defamation made by Waytha.
Ganesan said he did not make or write any of the statements alleged to have been contained in the article to Tamil Nesan or caused such statements to have been written in the first place.
Nevertheless, the high court found both Tamil Nesan and Ganesan liable for defamation and ordered them to pay RM200,000 in damages.
“The first defendant (Ganesan) wrote in English the statements contained in the article.
“The second defendant (Tamil Nesan), who received those statements via email from a third party, translated the article to Tamil and published it on the Tamil Nesan paper on March 13, 2016," the high court’s judgment read.
During Ganesan's challenge to the Court of Appeal, the three-judge court disagreed with the High Court’s finding.
The Court of Appeal on January 14, 2020 said Waytha could not rely on Tamil Nesan’s evidence to make out a case against Ganesan.
“The failure to produce primary evidence, the respondent’s (Ganesan) statement, would render the oral testimony of the person seeking to put forward this evidence to be inadmissible.
“In conclusion, we found that this is a classic case where the learned JC (high court judge) had failed to apply the correct position of the law and also failed to sufficiently appreciate the evidence before him.
“In the circumstances, this is a fit and proper case for this court to intervene to correct the decision which is plainly wrong,” the Court of Appeal’s judgment read.
Waytha further challenged this decision at the Federal Court, with the following two questions of law:
- In a defamation trial/proceeding where a defendant denies he is the author of the publication complained of, does the plaintiff bear a higher burden of proof than cases where there is no such denial?
- Can publication be proven by circumstantial evidence?
Unfortunately, the Federal Court on September 28 dismissed the appeal, saying there is no need to answer his two questions.
When contacted by The Vibes, Ganesan expressed relief that all trials and appeals are now over and the matter has been put to rest.
“I didn’t write the article in the first place, and it was brought all the way up to the Federal Court,” he said.
“Now the judgment has brought it all to an end,” Ganesan told The Vibes. – The Vibes, October 2, 2021
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