Kj Fails In Appeal Against Anwar S Defamation Suit

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 The Court of Appeal has today dismissed Health Minister Khairy Jamaluddin’s appeal against opposition leader Anwar Ibrahim’s defamation suit over a 2008 “main belakang” remark.
A three-person bench chaired by Lee Swee Seng unanimously ruled that there was no appealable error that warrants the bench's intervention. It also ordered the appellant to pay RM50,000 in costs to Anwar.
The other bench members are Darryl Goon Siew Chye and Ghazali Cha.
Today was set for the decision on the former Umno Youth chief’s appeal against a Kuala Lumpur High Court ruling on Sept 29, 2017, which ruled he was liable for defaming Anwar with the remark made at a ceramah in Lembah Pantai, Kuala Lumpur, in the run-up to the 12th general election (GE12) in 2008.
The lower court had ordered the Rembau MP to pay RM150,000 in damages to Port Dickson MP Anwar.
Goon read out the unanimous decision during this morning’s online proceedings via Zoom, ruling that there was no error on the part of lower court judge Azizul Azmi Adnan’s finding that Khairy’s remark was defamatory against Anwar.
The Court of Appeal ruled that the trial judge had correctly found that the remark, in the context of the statement’s analogy and figure of speech as well as its natural meaning and inference, is capable of being defamatory.
“As has been succinctly described, sayings like people are known by the company they keep, it is what the ordinary people infer from them,” Goon said.
Anwar’s lead counsel Gopal Sri RamAll about the context
In the previous Court of Appeal hearing on Nov 2 last year, Khairy’s legal team had submitted that the 2008 remark was not referring to Anwar’s sodomy case, but rather to the then opposition’s pre-election marriage of convenience in the run-up to GE12.
In response during submissions on Jan 17 this year, Anwar’s legal team, led by former federal court judge Gopal Sri Ram countered that the High Court had correctly surmised that the primarily Umno crowd at the 2008 Lembah Pantai speech understood the context of Khairy’s remark to refer to sodomy allegation against Anwar, rather than the then opposition’s alleged marriage of convenience.
In the run-up to GE12 in 2008, the then Pakatan Rakyat opposition coalition consisted of PKR, DAP and PAS.
Goon today added that the trial judge’s ruling for Khairy to pay RM150,000 in damages to Anwar was not manifestly excessive and thus also does not warrant the Court of Appeal’s intervention.
After the decision was delivered, Khairy’s counsel Muhammad Shafee Abdullah informed the panel that he has instructions to file for an application for leave to appeal to the Federal Court.
Anwar filed the defamation suit against Khairy in High Court in early 2008, a short while after the remark was uttered.
The appeal was long-standing as initially, on Feb 19, 2018, the Court of Appeal had dismissed Khairy’s appeal on a technicality without hearing its merits.
However, on Dec 15, 2020, the Federal Court allowed Khairy’s appeal against this initial dismissal and ordered the Court of Appeal to hear the merits of the minister’s appeal.
- Mkini

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