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.”
JAN. 1 CLAUSE: As military service is voluntary, applications for permission to stay abroad for over three months for men up to age 45 must, in principle, be granted A little-noticed clause in sweeping changes to Germany’s military service policy has triggered an uproar after it emerged that the law requires men aged up to 45 to get permission from the armed forces before any significant stay abroad, even in peacetime. The legislation, which went into effect on Jan. 1 aims to bolster the military and demands all 18-year-old men fill out a questionnaire to gauge their suitability to serve in the armed forces, but stops short of conscription. If the “modernized” model fails to pull in enough recruits, parliament will be compelled to discuss the reintroduction of compulsory service, German
PHISHING: The con might appear convincing, as the scam e-mails can coincide with genuine messages from Apple saying you have run out of storage For a while you have been getting messages from Apple saying “your iCloud storage is full.” They say you have exceeded your storage plan, so documents are no longer being backed up, and photos you take are not being uploaded. You have been resisting Apple’s efforts to get you to pay a minimum of ￡0.99 (US$1.33) a month for more storage, but it seems that you cannot keep putting off the inevitable: You have received an e-mail which says your iCloud account has been blocked, and your photos and videos would be deleted very soon. To keep them you need
For two decades, researchers observed members of the Ngogo chimpanzee group of Kibale National Park in Uganda spend their days eating fruits and leaves, resting, traveling and grooming in their tropical rainforest abode, but this stable community then fractured and descended into years of deadly violence. The researchers are now describing the first clearly documented example of a group of wild chimpanzees splitting into two separate factions, with one launching a series of coordinated attacks against the other. Adult males and infants were targeted, with 28 deaths. “Biting, pounding the victim with their hands, dragging them, kicking them — mostly adult males,
Filipino farmers like Romeo Wagayan have been left with little choice but to let their vegetables rot in the field rather than sell them at a loss, as rising oil prices linked to the Iran war drive up the cost of harvesting, labor and transport. “There’s nothing we can do,” said Wagayan, a 57-year old vegetable farmer in the northern Philippine province of Benguet. “If we harvest it, our losses only increase because of labor, transportation and packing costs. We don’t earn anything from it. That’s why we decided not to harvest at all,” he said. Soaring costs caused by the Middle East
RSS