Mayor Naheed Nenshi has formally received a home builder’s $6-million defamation lawsuit against him, but that hasn’t made him back off criticizing the legal action he now faces.

“The next step is to file a statement of defence against some of the very spurious allegations in here, and then we move from there,” Nenshi told reporters outside his office Thursday, brandishing Cal Wenzel’s statement of claim against him.

His office confirmed the mayor was served at 1:30 p.m. Thursday, more than a week after Wenzel’s lawyer filed the defamation suit. It claims Nenshi damaged the Shane Homes founder’s reputation by suggesting Wenzel admitted on videotape that he broke election finance laws during the 2010 election, and going on CBC Radio to compare Wenzel’s secretly taped speech to a scene from the mob drama The Godfather.

Wenzel’s suit calls these “malicious falsehoods made for the mayor’s political gain, as the criticism of the suburban builder and what Nenshi called his “slate” of business-friendly candidates came in the months and weeks before the October civic election.

“I believe this to be, in my opinion, an example of a SLAPP — a strategic lawsuit against public participation,” Nenshi said.

“The whole point of it is to distract your subject, to scare other people from speaking their minds, and to cause financial harm to the subject of the lawsuit through payment of legal fees.”

The lawyer for Cal Wenzel did not respond Thursday to a request for comment.

The mayor also said any request for council to cover his legal fees for this case would come at the end of the process.

“But I’ve not done it, I have no intent to do it at this time, but the actual decision to do that is actually years away,” he said.

jmarkusoff@calgaryherald.com