THE LEADER of Slovakia’s largest opposition party, Robert Fico, lost a lawsuit against the publisher of the Plus 7 Dní weekly, the SITA newswire reported, adding that the decision of Bratislava’s Regional Court was delivered to the publisher on November 10. The regional court confirmed a previous ruling made by a district court in March 2009.
Fico filed the libel suit against Plus 7 Dní, demanding an apology plus damages of €33,000, in response to an article in which the editor-in-chief of the weekly, Miloš Luknár, expressed several ironic opinions about a meeting that Fico had held with Colonel Muammar Gaddafi, the leader of the Socialist People's Libyan Arab Jamahiriya, the official name for Libya, SITA reported.
According to the deputy editor-in-chief of Plus 7 Dní, Radovan Kyška, the content of Fico’s talk with Gaddafi was not made public and only after journalists insisted did Fico say that he had spoken with Gaddafi about a fight against global imperialism. Fico argued in the lawsuit that this was not true and that was why he demanded the apology from the weekly and the award of damages. The verdict of the regional court cannot be appealed.
