The Trinidad Express newspaper has been ordered to pay former University of T&T (UTT) president Ken Julien over $500,000 in damages for a series of libelous articles related to his role at the tertiary education institution. The payout, one of the highest ever in a local defamation case, was ordered by High Court Judge Devindra Rampersad when he ruled in Julien’s favour in the lawsuit yesterday. The main reason given for the substantial compensation award was Julien’s “highly decorated and publically acclaimed life and history.”
Rampersad said: “It is highly probable that the claimant and his family would have suffered humiliation and would have become the brunt of negative remarks and comment out of what was termed to be an “investigative” series in one of the leading daily newspapers in T&T which would have carried a high degree of weight in the mind of an ordinary person.”
Julien is the recipient of the T&T’s former highest award Trinity Cross (replaced by the Order of T&T) for his role in national economic development as well as the Chaconia Gold for his contribution to education and public life. Besides the board of UTT, Julien has also served on several other State enterprises, including Evolving TecKnologies and Enterprise Development Company Ltd (e-Teck). He was a senior lecturer in electrical engineering at the University of West Indies, before he retired in 1996.
The articles, published between November and December 2006, were written by the newspaper’s investigative reporter Camini Marajh and dealt mainly with Julien’s management of UTT, his requirement to file declarations to the Integrity Commission, multi-million research deals between UTT and international universities as well as allegations against Julien from his former colleague at UTT, Kenneth Fitz-Andrews.
In defence of the claim, the newspaper contended the stories were in the public’s interest as UTT was a government-funded institution, a fact with which Rampersad agreed. However, he disagreed with the newspaper’s main defence that the series of articles were a product of responsible journalism. “To my mind, the first named defendant’s (Marajh) motivation seemed to be to get the proverbial “scoop” from a disgruntled employee rather than to produce a balanced professional article.
“This does not reflect responsible journalism but, rather what one might expect from a sensationalist tabloid writer,” Rampersad said. He also took issue with the newspaper’s failure to acknowledge rebuttal statements from a university representative and from Julien’s attorney before it continued publishing follow-up articles on Julien and UTT.
Julien was represented by Reginald Armour, SC, and Stuart Young and Anthony Bullock. Senior Counsel Christopher Hamel-Smith and attorneys Faarees Hosein and Carolyn Ramjohn-Hosein represented the newspaper and its reporter.