1. Mr Anthony Bennett complained to the Independent Press Standards Organisation that the Daily Express had breached Clause 1 (Accuracy) of the Editors’ Code of Practice in a front-page headline “Maddy: Detective did lie about death cover-up”, published on 29 April 2015.
2. The front-page headline referred to an article on page 11 with the headline “McCanns win £428,000 over police chief’s slurs”.
. The newspaper accepted that the headline on the front page was inaccurate, and agreed that the truth of Mr Amaral’s claims were not examined during the trial. However, it did not accept that the front page headline represented a significant inaccuracy because the article itself did not report that the detective had lied, and was an accurate interpretation of the judgment. It said the headline had been written by a sub-editor who, in summarising the position of the Portuguese court, had made an assumption that the decision had been based on the truth of Mr Amaral’s claims, which is usually the case in English libel law.