'Shamed' Mitts CEO away on urgent private matters

Just 24 hours after agreeing that the Mitts CEO should be "ashamed of himself" for going abroad while a sensitive investigation was ongoing at the government IT agency, Infrastructure Minister Austin Gatt would not comment on whether the executive should resign.

"As far as the ministry is concerned, the CEO reports to the board and it is up to the board of directors to be satisfied or otherwise with the CEO's explanations," Dr Gatt said.

The minister added that the CEO had explained his absence to the board. Such travel was motivated by private reasons that could not be postponed and it was not a question of him being on holiday, Dr Gatt said.

Yet, in Parliament on Tuesday, he had agreed with Labour MP Leo Brincat that the CEO should be "ashamed of himself" for being abroad at such a sensitive time. He even said he would look into the matter when the CEO returns.

He was speaking just after he made a statement in which he said that usernames and passwords belonging to 20,000 users of the government IT system had been copied by hackers on September 4.

The attack, suspected to have been made through the system at Malta's Embassy in Cairo, rattled the government's IT company, which has been at the centre of an uncomfortable police investigation since.

For the first time on Tuesday, the minister went into the details of the hacking, excluding that the e-mails of any MPs, but specifically those of former Opposition Leader Alfred Sant, had been hacked.

He even accused Dr Sant of spinning the story to MaltaToday which has reported that the e-mails of senior Labour officials, including that of Dr Sant, had been hacked.

Dr Sant immediately raised a breach of privilege against Dr Gatt, which was upheld by the Speaker yesterday.

The newspaper reported that Dr Sant had made a complaint about his e-mail account being hacked as early as September 2007.

When contacted yesterday and asked whether he had filed a complaint in 2007, Dr Sant's curt reply was: "Show me where I said that".

He complained again about Dr Gatt's comments, saying they were unacceptable, but would not comment further on the matter.

Dr Gatt said in Parliament that American experts, commissioned to establish whether information had been copied from Mitts' systems, had concluded that the computer system at the Maltese Embassy in Cairo was infected with malware that was permitting connection between the government network and the internet.

The experts said that all traces of the attack indicated it was the work of an amateur and recommended that the embassy should be cut off from the government network.