A certain clause in the Standards in Public Life Act need to be addressed.
The clause in question deals with time-barring. The Act states that “a complaint under this Act shall not be entertained unless it is made not later than thirty working days from the day on which the complainant had knowledge of the fact giving rise to the complaint or than one year from when the fact giving rise to the complaint happened, whichever date is the earliest.”
The clause has resulted in the Standards Commissioner being unable to investigate potential ethics breaches in the past. Two recent cases by the current Standards Commissioner were time-barred under it.
One was when Repubblika had asked for an investigation after it was reported that MP Rosianne Cutajar did not disclose her "additional" work as an ITS consultant when she submitted her required financial statements to Parliament for 2019. The second, was over a complaint related to the driving test racket, with Arnold Cassola alleging that Minister Ian Borg “endangered the lives of thousands of drivers and pedestrians by recommending and ordering his subordinate Clint Mansueto to enable candidates taking the driving test to pass when they were unable to do so without the minister’s help,” which the Commissioner also said was time-barred. Although on this second case the Commissioner also noted that he did not want to prejudice the ongoing court case against three Transport Malta Officials.
Regardless, it is clear that the time-barring clause is only there to benefit politicians, and does not help uphold best standards in public life – a concept that is being severely strained with recent decisions taken by Prime Minister Robert Abela with his statements welcoming back people who faced scandals in the recent past, a topic which has been covered in other recent editorials.
Back on point, the Standards Commissioner himself has highlighted in the two aforementioned case reports that the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) had said that the time-barring clause should be extended.
The OECD had said: “To enable the Commissioner adequate time to review a breach of statutory or ethical duties that may have occurred during an elected or appointed officials’ term in office, without unduly restricting the process, the Ministry of Justice could lengthen the period of time within which a person can submit a complaint. In this sense, the Ministry for Justice could consider revisiting the ‘thirty working days’ and the ‘one year’ timeframes to submit and investigate a complaint, in order to encourage more complainants to come forward and strengthen citizen’s trust in the integrity system.”
The limits must be extended in order to ensure fewer cases are time barred. Ideally, the time-barring clause should be removed altogether.
Another issue to be pointed out was that the Commissioner said that he was unable to investigate certain officials as they do not fall under the act. The cases in question related to Steve Ellul, when he was the head of Project Green, Kurt Farrugia who is the CEO of Malta Enterprise, and Chairperson of the State Aid Monitoring Board, Paul Zahra. One can agree that all three are in high positions, but the Commissioner was unable to investigate as they did not fall under the Act. Should this be the case? If we want to ensure better standards then, perhaps, we should ensure that those holding top positions in government agencies or boards are also subject to scrutiny by the Office of the Standards Commissioner.