In a response to her defence statement against his defamation suit, Azam said Lalitha could not be trusted, claiming that she did “sloppy work”. Azam’s response was filed at the Kuala Lumpur High Court this morning.
For instance, he said, it did not make sense for her to claim she did not know his work address.
“An ‘investigative journalist’ can easily look up on Google the MACC headquarters’ address,” he said.
Azam sued Lalitha last month over her two articles, “Business ties among MACC leadership: How deep does it go? (Part 1)” and “Business ties among MACC leadership: How deep does it go? (Part Two)”, which were published on the INS portal on Oct 26 last year and republished on Dec 15.
He claimed that she had shared links to the articles on her Twitter account @LalithaVelvet that were accessible to this day.
Azam said the articles were sensational, scandalous and offensive, and were written and republished with malicious intent to give a bad perception to readers that he was a corrupt civil servant or one who had abused his position as a senior MACC officer for his or his sibling’s interests.
He claimed that the alleged defamatory statements, among others, said he owned shares and warrants worth millions of ringgit purchased with money obtained illegally and that he had invested millions of ringgit in a short period of time, apart from not declaring the purchase of shares and warrants during his tenure as the MACC director of investigations.
In addition, he claimed that the statement said he and his brother, through the company RI Intelligence Sdn Bhd, were directly or indirectly involved in illegal activities.
In her defence, Lalitha said the disputed words, in their proper context and natural and ordinary meaning, were not defamatory as set out in Azam’s statement of claim.
If these words were defamatory, she had said, then she would rely on the defence of neutral reportage, qualified privilege, “Reynolds defence”, fair comment, justification and several provisions in the Defamation Act.
Reynolds v Times Newspapers Ltd was a House of Lords case in English defamation law concerning qualified privilege for publication of defamatory statements in the public interest. The case provided the Reynolds defence, which could be raised where it was clear that the journalist had a duty to publish an allegation even if it turned out to be wrong.
Meanwhile, Azam pointed out that Lalitha had left her job at the Center to Combat Corruption and Cronyism (C4) in December 2020.
“She pleaded in her defence that she was a C4 employee when she wrote the impugned articles on Oct 26, 2021.
“Thus, her defence statement filed on Feb 4 was not true and contradicted C4’s media statement. She has made a false statement with an attempt to mislead the court,” he said.
It was reported that a police report was lodged against Lalitha last week for allegedly lying to the court on her employment status.
However, Bukit Aman said the report had been marked as “NFA” (no further action).