Po­lit­i­cal Leader of the Pro­gres­sive Em­pow­er­ment Par­ty, Phillip Ed­ward Alexan­der has been or­dered to pay Fi­nance Min­is­ter Colm Im­bert $525,000 in dam­ages af­ter los­ing a defama­tion case.

Im­bert post­ed a copy of the judg­ment on X (For­mer­ly Twit­ter) say­ing, " I got an award for defama­tion of $525K to­day against Phillip Alexan­der. He had false­ly al­leged that I pur­chased an ex­ot­ic Swedish sports car for US$2M us­ing forex that I ob­tained by cor­rupt means or by abus­ing my of­fice as the MOF."

Alexan­der's posts were pub­lished on 29 Feb­ru­ary 2020 and 1 March 2020.

In the judg­ment, Jus­tice Jacque­line Wil­son KC said Alexan­der's state­ments did not meet the cri­te­ria of fair com­ment. She found Alexan­der failed to "es­tab­lish that the steps he had tak­en to gath­er and pub­lish the in­for­ma­tion were re­spon­si­ble and fair. "

She went on to state, "Al­though there is a sig­nif­i­cant pub­lic in­ter­est in de­ter­min­ing that for­eign ex­change re­serves are dis­trib­uted in a fair and trans­par­ent man­ner, the de­fen­dant has failed to demon­strate that he took rea­son­able steps to ver­i­fy that the al­le­ga­tions made against the claimant were true. The tone of the pub­li­ca­tions was nei­ther mea­sured nor cir­cum­spect but may be la­belled as cav­a­lier or even dra­mat­ic. "

Jus­tice Wil­son based the award of dam­ages on sev­er­al sim­i­lar judg­ments in­clud­ing an­oth­er defama­tion case Alexan­der lost against busi­ness­man An­drew Gabriel.

"On the facts of this case and hav­ing re­gard to the na­ture of the al­le­ga­tions, the man­ner and du­ra­tion of the pub­li­ca­tions and the claimant’s sta­tus as Min­is­ter of Fi­nance, I have con­clud­ed that an award in the sum of $525,000.00 is ap­pro­pri­ate com­pen­sa­tion to the claimant as gen­er­al dam­ages."