Midnight call logs to stay on Daphne’s blog

Call logs of a midnight chat between MaltaToday co-owner Saviour Balzan and the Prime Minister’s top aide Keith Schembri will remain online, a data tribunal decided last week. The call logs were published by assassinated journalist Daphne Caruana Galizia after Mr Balzan took to Facebook denying that the late-night chat had taken place just hours after Ms Caruana Galizia published the Egrant story in April 2017. Mr Balzan threatened to sue the journalist but quickly retracted the threat and removed the Facebook post once Ms Caruana Galizia had published call logs showing the conversations did in fact take place. The logs showed that Mr Schembri called the newspaper editor at 00:42 on April 21. Their late-night chat lasted around eight minutes. Two subsequent conversations took place the following day, one of which lasted over 20 minutes, according to the call logs published by Ms Caruana Galizia. Both Mr Balzan and Mr Schembri filed complaints with the Data Commissioner, in which they asked for their mobile numbers and the call logs to be removed from Ms Caruana Galizia’s blog. This request was upheld by the Data Commissioner, who deemed there was no public interest justifying...