Gauteng High Court (Pretoria) Acting Judge Norman Davis has thrown out Genesis’ defamation case against the Council for Medical Schemes and rebuked the medical scheme for engaging in time-wasting and costly litigation. A Business Day report says the scheme petitioned the court to compel the regulator to remove ‘defamatory statements’ from its website.

At the heart of the dispute is the council’s intimation on its website that Genesis might have contravened the law by failing to comply with a SCA judgment on prescribed minimum benefits. In a newsletter published on the council’s site in January, it wrote: ‘The scheme continues to disregard the court pronouncement and still declines funding members’ accounts for services rendered in private hospitals.’

This prompted Genesis to institute its application. Davis said that while it might be defamatory to allege that a scheme was acting contrary to statutory provisions, such an allegation would not attract liability if it was true and if the publication of such a statement were in the public interest. The judge ruled that the statement published on the council’s website was in line with the SCA’s ruling.

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