Thursday 28 Mar 2024
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This article first appeared in The Edge Financial Daily on October 25, 2019

KUALA LUMPUR: AirAsia Group Bhd, AirAsia X Bhd (AAX) and their respective chief executive officers Riad Asmat and Benyamin Ismail will remain as defendants in a defamation suit filed by Malaysia Airports Holdings Bhd (MAHB) and Malaysia Airports (Sepang) Sdn Bhd (MASSB) after the High Court here refused to strike out the names of the latter two defendants in the legal action.

Plaintiffs MAHB and MASSB alleged that several AirAsia statements appearing between December 2018 and February 2019 implied that it was MAHB and MASSB which had increased Malaysia’s passenger service charge (PSC) from RM50 to RM73.

MAHB and MASSB said it was the Malaysian Aviation Commission that had increased the PSC.

MAHB and MASSB’s lawyer Khoo Guan Huat and AirAsia’s counsel Alex De Silva told The Edge Financial Daily yesterday that High Court Judge Datuk Mohd Firuz Jaffril made the decision in his chambers to not strike out the defendants’ names in the legal action.

Judge Mohd Firuz ruled this is not a plain and obvious case to allow the defendants’ names to be struck out from the defamation suit.

With this, the hearing of MAHB and MASSB’s suit against the defendants has been fixed on April 20 to 23, 2020.

The court has ordered Riad and Benyamin to pay costs of RM10,000.

MAHB and MASSB named AirAsia Group, AAX, Riad and Benyamin as defendants in the defamation suit filed in February 2019.

MAHB claimed that AirAsia’s statements implied that the plaintiffs are “greedy and of questionable ethics” and that the plaintiffs purportedly sought to increase the PSC to enrich “a selected few without regard for the welfare of air travellers and the wider economy”.

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