Clive Palmer drops case against The Australian newspaper

THE Australian will not have to pay Clive Palmer any damages or apologise after he quietly dropped his $1m defamation action against the newspaper.

THE Australian will not have to pay Clive Palmer any damages or apologise to the businessman turned politician after he quietly dropped his $1 million defamation action against the newspaper.

Mr Palmer, leader of the Palmer United Party, took the action over five articles that appeared in the newspaper last year by Brisbane-based journalist Hedley Thomas.

The articles covered Mr Palmer’s business activities in the mining and tourism sectors, as well as his dealings with the Chinese government-owned mining giant Citic Pacific.

Mr Palmer told the ABC’s Lateline program that The Australian’s reporting about the matter was “an invention”.

But in August, Supreme Court judge David Boddice significantly narrowed the scope of Mr Palmer’s defamation action when he ruled that three of the five articles carried no imputations against Mr Palmer. Nine of the 10 imputations alleged by Mr Palmer were struck out by the court.

Mr Palmer’s lawyers, Hopgood Gamin, recently settled the defamation ­action concerning the other matter.

The Australian is not required to publish any apology or pay any money to Mr Palmer.

Mr Palmer took to Twitter yesterday to say “Action against The Australian dismissed by mutual consent. No order of costs. Trial would take too long. Rather spend time with Fairfax voters”.

Thomas said yesterday that Mr Palmer had become angry with The Australian in June last year when the paper began reporting on his business practices, loose hold on the truth, and bullying of his staff and others.

“If he’s dropping this action to spend more time with his constituents on the Sunshine Coast, then why did he launch the action in the first place?” he said.

The dropping of this action comes after Mr Palmer has suffered several legal defeats, and yesterday his private company, Mineralogy, again issued a notice of termination to its estranged Chinese business partner Citic over the Sino Iron project in WA, defying a recently granted injunction that was supposed to prevent Mineralogy from taking such ­action.

According to a statement from Mineralogy, the latest termination notice gives Citic 90 days to rectify what Mineralogy said were defaults linked to the project.

Mineralogy has issued several similar termination notices to Citic in the past, and late last month the WA Supreme Court granted an interim injunction preventing Mineralogy from terminating the project. The injunction was also supposed to restrain Mineralogy from issuing further termination notices.