Journalist Mohamed Fahmy dropped his $77 million lawsuit against Al Jazeera over his 2013 jailing in Egypt, The Press Gazette reported.
Fahmy sued Al Jazeera in 2015 for negligence. As iMediaEthics reported at the time:
iMediaEthics has published a series of investigative reports on Egypt and Al Jazeera, including an exclusive interview with a former criminal lawyer for Al Jazeera, Farag Fathy Farag, who claimed Al Jazeera tried to launder money through him to pay people to stage protests.
iMediaEthics was the first to publish that Al jazeera set up staff for enforcement because staff did not have the proper licenses and Al Jazeera did not follow its then-attorney’s warnings against suing Egypt.
In 2017, the New York Times reported that “a senior official of the United Arab Emirates later provided $250,000 to help pay for the legal action.” The Times reported that Fahmy called it a “loan” from a friend and that he gave the money to a “third party,” Emirati ambassador to Washington, Yousef al-Otaiba.
In a statement in its own news story, Al Jazeera said it “Worked extremely hard to support” Fahmy after and during his arrest and imprisonment and said it was “extremely disappointed when Mr Fahmy sought to transfer blame for the oppressive and unlawful actions of the Egyptian authorities onto the Network.”
“That it is now clear that he did this in collaboration with a regime that is fundamentally opposed to free and independent journalism only heightens our sense of disappointment,” the statement continued.
iMediaEthics has written to Fahmy and Al Jazeera.