Vancouver sources reported that an Indo-Canadian businessman, who is originally from Bhuj, Gujarat, has been awarded $1.2 million in damages after he was defamed in a series of fake news articles instigated by a prominent American blockchain investor. Accordingly it is one of the biggest compensations of its kind in Canada. Vancouver based Altaf Nazerali had sued Patrick Byrne, CEO of online retailer Overstock.com, for a campaign of lies aimed to tarnish the reputation of the NRI businessman.
Earlier the Supreme Court of Canada rejected Byrne’s appeal against $1.2 million granted to the NRI businessman by the Supreme Court of British Columbia in 2016. Meanwhile the huge compensation for Nazerali comes after a seven-year legal battle to clear his name after a series of articles published in 2011, on an American website DeepCapture.com tried to depict the NRI businessman as a drug trafficker, arms dealer and gangster and a financial supporter of al-Qaida. The articles tried to show that he had links to Russian and Italian mafias.
Further the articles were written by Mark Mitchell
and published on the website owned and published by Byrne which reports on
criminal financial conspiracies. Moreover “It is clear on the evidence that
their intention was to conduct a vendetta in which the truth about Nazerali
himself was of no consequence.”
