Manuel Delia Sued In Bulgaria By Owner Of Shuttered Maltese Bank
Manuel Delia has been sued in Bulgaria by Christo Georgiev, the Bulgarian owner of Satabank, the Maltese bank which was forced to cancel its operations due to serious concerns that it had allowed criminals to launder their dirty money.
Delia said Georgiev is suing him over a blogpost he wrote back in October 2018, shortly after the Malta Financial Services Authority (MFSA) ordered Satabank to freeze all its clients’ accounts.
In that blogpost, Delia recounted how he had retracted a story he had written about the bank after Georgiev’s lawyers threatened him with legal action in the UK. Back then, Delia said one of the banker’s Malta lawyers had warned him that he [Delia] will “have no choice but to jump off Dingli Cliffs” if Georgiev decided to go through with his lawsuit.
“I chose the easy way out. Satabank was not the most important issue I was working on and having to defend the issue alone in the UK, without a realistic prospect of continuing working on the website even if I did find anyone willing to pay for the legal costs for my defence, I decided to bow to the SLAPP threat I was faced with,” Delia wrote.
“I do not feel vindicated that seven months later the Maltese police are acting on information I published in March. I only feel embarrassment for having agreed with Satabank to retract my story on them. I buckled under their pressure and in doing so I effectively helped them to continue with what they were up to until reality and better journalists at the Times of Malta caught up with them.”
“I can only hope I’ve learnt my lesson and this experience will help me trust that little bit more the courage of my own convictions.”
Now, over a year since that blogpost was published, Georgiev has sued Delia in Bulgaria for damages, specifically over his statement about “the personal record of Satabank’s owner Christo Georgiev and the investigations he was facing by various police forces around the world while being sheltered here in Malta by Joseph Muscat’s government.”
He warned that this is yet another example of SLAPP, a lawsuit intended to silence critics by burdening them with an unaffordable high cost of a legal defence.