A Chinese-Australian billionaire businessman yesterday won a high-profile defamation case against a newspaper that alleged he was a coconspirator in a plot to bribe a top UN official, amid fears of Beijing meddling in domestic politics.
Fairfax Media, publisher of the Sydney Morning Herald, was ordered to pay Chau Chak Wing (周澤榮) A$280,000 (US$199,073) in damages after a judge at the Federal Court of Australia ruled that the 2015 article was defamatory.
“The natural and ordinary meaning of the words employed in the article, and the overall impression conveyed by the article considered as a whole, was not merely one of suspicion, but one of guilt,” Justice Michael Wigney said in his judgement. “I consider their [Fairfax and its reporter] conduct to have been unreasonable in many respects.”
New Fairfax owner Nine Publishing said that it would appeal the decision.
The decision came as tensions between Canberra and Beijing rise over fears of Chinese influence in Australian politics.
An Australian citizen who made his money in property development, Chau has consistently denied any links to the Chinese Communist Party or the UN scandal, and yesterday said that his faith in the Australian legal system “has been vindicated.”
Chau added that he would donate the damages to charities supporting Australian military veterans and their families.
The ruling came almost a year after Australian Parliamentary Joint Committee on Intelligence and Security Chair Andrew Hastie used the legal protection of parliamentary privilege to identify Chau as a previously unnamed figure in a US FBI case.
That case related to former UN General Assembly president John Ashe, who was accused of accepting bribes from Chinese businesspeople seeking to influence the world body.
Ashe was arrested in 2015 and died a year later. The scandal was a major blow to the UN.
Australia’s defamation laws have been criticized for being too biased toward plaintiffs and impinging on public-interest journalism.
Hastie yesterday said that he was “concerned about the impact that defamation laws in Australia are having on responsible journalism that informs Australians about important national security issues.”
‘BARBAROUS ACTS’: The captain of the fishing vessel said that people in checkered clothes beat them with iron bars and that he fell unconscious for about an hour Ten Vietnamese fishers were violently robbed in the South China Sea, state media reported yesterday, with an official saying the attackers came from Chinese-flagged vessels. The men were reportedly beaten with iron bars and robbed of thousands of dollars of fish and equipment on Sunday off the Paracel Islands (Xisha Islands, 西沙群島), which Taiwan claims, as do Vietnam, China, Brunei, Malaysia and the Philippines. Vietnamese media did not identify the nationalities of the attackers, but Phung Ba Vuong, an official in central Quang Ngai province, told reporters: “They were Chinese, [the boats had] Chinese flags.” Four of the 10-man Vietnamese crew were rushed
NEW STORM: investigators dubbed the attacks on US telecoms ‘Salt Typhoon,’ after authorities earlier this year disrupted China’s ‘Flax Typhoon’ hacking group Chinese hackers accessed the networks of US broadband providers and obtained information from systems that the federal government uses for court-authorized wiretapping, the Wall Street Journal (WSJ) reported on Saturday. The networks of Verizon Communications, AT&T and Lumen Technologies, along with other telecoms, were breached by the recently discovered intrusion, the newspaper said, citing people familiar with the matter. The hackers might have held access for months to network infrastructure used by the companies to cooperate with court-authorized US requests for communications data, the report said. The hackers had also accessed other tranches of Internet traffic, it said. The Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs
STICKING TO DEFENSE: Despite the screening of videos in which they appeared, one of the defendants said they had no memory of the event A court trying a Frenchman charged with drugging his wife and enlisting dozens of strangers to rape her screened videos of the abuse to the public on Friday, to challenge several codefendants who denied knowing she was unconscious during their actions. The judge in the southern city of Avignon had nine videos and several photographs of the abuse of Gisele Pelicot shown in the courtroom and an adjoining public chamber, involving seven of the 50 men accused alongside her husband. Present in the courtroom herself, Gisele Pelicot looked at her telephone during the hour and a half of screenings, while her ex-husband
Scientists yesterday announced a milestone in neurobiological research with the mapping of the entire brain of an adult fruit fly, a feat that might provide insight into the brains of other organisms and even people. The research detailed more than 50 million connections between more than 139,000 neurons — brain nerve cells — in the insect, a species whose scientific name is Drosophila melanogaster and is often used in neurobiological studies. The research sought to decipher how brains are wired and the signals underlying healthy brain functions. It could also pave the way for mapping the brains of other species. “You might
RSS