Threats to Sue Ziarul de Garda, Again

The management of the investigation weekly Ziarul de Garda (ZdG) notifies that it was summoned to court for the preliminary hearing of a lawsuit initiated by a judge whose identity was not revealed. The judge claims that some information about her published by ZdG is wrong and demands that the publication apologizes. According to ZdG, the preliminary claim says that the judge disagrees with the way the information about her activity and property was presented.

'The impact the publication of the picture of our house had on myself and my family members will be specified in the summons; the authors of the publication must be aware of the impact of the harassment of our family for nine years just because I am a judge,' says the letter received by ZdG.The judge claims that the experts hired by the publication valuated the price of her house wrongly and thus ZdG specified the wrong price in its article. Finally, she demands that ZdG apologizes to her and her family, warning that she will take it to court otherwise.

ZdG journalists have been publishing investigation articles about the property of top officials, judges and prosecutors for several years, inquiring how could many of them, given their budgetary wages, afford to buy luxury property worth millions of lei.It is not for the first time that investigation materials published by ZdG upset some persons in the judiciary.

In 2011, for instance, the court ruled that ZdG pay a million and a half lei to two prosecutors who had sued the publication for defamation. Subsequently, the Supreme Court of Justice ruled in favor of the publication.