Court clears Sunday Punch of libel
A court Pasig City last week dismissed libel charges filed by a bank against the staff of Sunday Punch, a newsweekly in Dagupan City, Pangasinan province, for a series of stories about the bank’s alleged use of public funds to pay its electricity consumption, a statement from the Center for International Law (CenterLaw) said.
CenterLaw represented Sunday Punch when Pasig City-based Citystate Savings Bank Inc. filed two counts of libel against the newspaper’s staff for articles published last year on whether the electricity used by a branch in Dagupan was being shouldered by the bank or by the Dagupan government.
These articles, published in the Sunday Punch’s Aug. 25 to 31 and Sept. 1 to 7, 2013, issues, included statements made by Dagupan City Mayor Belen Fernandez and the local electric utility, which Citystate asserted were false.
But Pasig City Regional Trial Court Judge Rolando Mislang, in a decision issued on Aug. 27, found no probable cause to try the case.
The CenterLaw statement quoted Mislang as saying: “There being no malice in the subject articles. A reasonably discreet and prudent person would find it difficult to charge the accused for libel.”
Lawyer Harry Roque, CenterLaw chair and one of the Sunday Punch’s counsels, said the ruling “recognizes that a discussion [as to how] public property is managed is imbued with public interest,” which newspapers are tasked to examine.
The decision said the bank “failed to prove not only that the charges made by the accused in the subject articles were false but also that the accused made them with knowledge of their falsity or with reckless disregard of whether they were false or not.”
Mislang’s ruling also said Citystate Savings Bank sued the Sunday Punch’s editor in chief and publisher Ermin Garcia Jr., the paper’s editors, news correspondents, online administrator and cartoonist without stipulating “how each of [the accused] could have actively participated in the publication of the subject articles.” Inquirer Northern Luzon
