The businessman, Chau Chak Wing, a well-connected political donor in Australia, was awarded 280,000 Australian dollars ($200,000) in damages in the verdict against Fairfax Media and journalist John Garnaut. Fairfax said it was appealing the decision.
In an October 2015 article, the Sydney Morning Herald, a Fairfax newspaper, reported Chau’s supposed connection with an international bribery scandal involving John Ashe, a former president of the U.N. General Assembly. The article was published around the time that U.S. prosecutors charged that Ashe had accepted bribes from Chinese businessmen to support their interests at the United Nations and Ashe’s native Antigua. Ashe died in 2016.
After Friday’s ruling, Chau, a billionaire property developer who immigrated to Australia decades ago and has faced previous accusations of using his money to meddle in the country’s politics on behalf of China, said he would continue to donate to “worthy causes as I have always done.”
“I make no apology for my philanthropy, and consider it a duty to give back after the good fortune I have experienced with my business,” he said in a statement.
In his ruling, Justice Michael Wigney said Garnaut’s October 2015 article “detailed Dr. Chau’s apparent wealth, the various political and other donations he had made in Australia over the years, and his contacts and associations with certain Australian politicians on both sides of the divide.”
“It appeared to somehow link the bribery allegations with Dr. Chau’s donations and political connections,” the judge wrote.
In a statement, Fairfax Media said it was disappointed that the judge “did not uphold our public interest defense, which was the only one available to us under Australian defamation law, and was not persuaded by our evidence.”
Garnaut defended his reporting, saying: “I took great care in compiling this story, building on six years of close observation. I believe the story was reported fairly, responsibly and in the public interest.”
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.