A simple Freedom of Information request filed in January has resulted in six months of silence, missed deadlines and outright deceitful behaviour, suggesting that the government is reluctant to answer the question that has been asked.

The Home Affairs Ministry has even been reduced to falsely claiming that the request was sent only last month to justify its failure to make a decision on it for so long. Adding insult to injury, it also availed itself of the right to extend the deadline, as “more time is needed to obtain the necessary feedback”.

The request concerned the controversial Individual Investor Programme – the provision of Maltese citizenship against payment, effectively – and the government was asked to state who had advised it on the scheme, before Henley and Partners were brought in as the programme’s “concessionaire”.

The reason for this request is simple: while other programmes providing passports to wealthy investors exist around the world, Malta is unique in granting such extensive powers to a private entity, which is awarded a public service concession “to design, implement, administer, operate and promote the programme.”

Coincidentally, however, Henley and Partners had been promoting a similar scheme in the Caribbean island nation of Antigua and Barbuda, only for it to be rejected by the country’s parliament.

This newsroom hopes that the company – or persons linked to it – did not advise the government on the scheme before it was officially awarded the lucrative public service concession. Such a practice would be unethical, at the very least.

However, according to a rival bidder for the concession, Arton Capital, this unethical practice has actually taken place and it has filed a court application calling for the cancellation of the contract due to a conflict of interest and an unfair advantage.

Listing advisors should be a simple exercise, taking a few hours at most to compile. Instead, a request that was originally filed on 14 January remains unanswered after more than half a year has passed.

The six-month farce

The request was sent to the Office of the Prime Minister and, according to the Freedom of Information Act, public authorities are obliged to decide on a request within 20 working days.

But the OPM ignored the request, and similarly ignored an email sent on 19 February as well as an article in the following Sunday’s edition of this newspaper.

A complaint was then sent to the Office of the Information and Data Protection Commissioner (IDPC) on 4 March, but the position of commissioner was vacant at the time, and remained so until Saviour Cachia was appointed on 16 April.

His appointment soon led to IDPC’s intervention: on 24 April, an OPM spokesman finally replied, but only to insist that the request should have been made to the Home Affairs Minister.

This reply suggests that the OPM is not particularly familiar with the Freedom of Information Act, which states that public authorities are to transfer requests within 10 working days if they believe that the information being sought is held by another public authority.

Since the OPM was clearly not about to do its job, an identical request was thus sent to the Home Affairs Ministry on the same day, thus starting the process from scratch.

But the new 20-working day deadline came and went with no sign of activity from the Ministry, which was sent a reminder on 11 June.

The request was eventually acknowledged on 17 June, but since the Ministry should long have issued a decision by then, another complaint was sent to IDPC eight days later.

 

Government buys time through fraud

Last Wednesday, however, the Ministry confirmed that it is not above lying to avoid answering a question, if only for a little while longer.

It informed this newsroom that the request had been extended by 20 working days to 13 August – but in doing so, it also claimed that the request was sent on 17 June – the day it was acknowledged.

Such behaviour is not only childish, at best, but is also specifically disallowed by the Freedom of Information Act, which starts counting deadlines from the day the request is received by the public authority. The public authority is not able to change the deadline by pretending that the request was never sent in the first place.

This newsroom sent a letter of protest to the communications coordinator of the Ministry, Ramona Attard, as well as to the government’s head of communications, Kurt Farrugia. But in what appears to have become a familiar pattern, neither bothered to acknowledge it, let alone send a reply.

The failure on the part of the government’s spokesmen to reply to this newsroom’s email is probably all one needs to know about the government’s commitment to transparency, in spite of the repeated pledges of Prime Minister Joseph Muscat.

Mr Farrugia’s contempt for the press is also at odds with his previous post as Labour’s head of communications during the previous legislature, when the party frequently accused the Nationalist government of being arrogant.

Whether this accusation held water may be debateable, but one thing is certain: at least the previous head of government communications actually answered journalists’ emails.