After two weeks of silence, the Nationalist Party's general secretary, Paul Borg Olivier, finally responded to allegations that he breached the law when asking Cabinet to forward personal details of people making complaints.
The allegations surfaced when Dr Borg Olivier sent an e-mail to all Cabinet ministers and mistakenly copied to Labour Party (PL) general secretary Jason Micallef instead of Parliamentary Secretary Jason Azzopardi.
The infamous e-mail was published yesterday by Labour leader Joseph Muscat during a press conference held in the morning when he called on the new Data Protection Commissioner (who has still to be appointed) to launch an investigation.
Fifteen minutes after the press conference had started, the PN released a statement saying the e-mail would be published today on the TV talk show Xarabank.
Apart from other members of the Cabinet, the e-mail was also sent to the PN's strategy group and the party's customer care section. In it, Dr Borg Olivier referred to the conclusions of a meeting they all had in which it was decided how such information should be shared.
The controversial line says: "... every customer care office is being asked to hand all the data on a template which will be provided by Charmaine Gerada. The data (excel) should include 1) personal data of persons who move a complaint to the customer care of the ministry/parliamentary secretariat in the past eight months 2) type of request 3) Action and 4) Results (pending)".
Dr Borg Olivier said in his e-mail that the measure was meant to manage better the complaints government ministries received and to identify "pockets of weakness" the government had. Moreover, the measure was meant to create a proper audit trail of complaints received while at the same time maximising the available resources.
Although the PN immediately clarified that this had to be done within the parameters of the Data Protection Act, Dr Muscat insisted that such "damage control" reply was "doctored" and did not hold water.
Dr Borg Olivier insisted yesterday afternoon that the e-mail was not incriminating because it stated that the information would only be accessible to the Office of the Prime Minister.
He said the e-mail did not speak about the transfer of information from the government to the PN but only the other way around. When it was pointed out to him that even this may be illegal without the consent of the people making the complaint, he said complainants would want their grievances to reach the government.
Ironically, in the process of defending himself, Dr Borg Olivier exposed inefficiencies in the way the government handles complaints. He said that his office had come up with this mechanism because hundreds of complaints received by the PN were not being followed up properly by the respective ministries.
By creating a database that would be accessible at the Office of the Prime Minister, the party would be able to immediately inform the government whenever a complaint is made.
"It is our duty and in our interest as a political party to make sure that whoever complains is listened to and that his problem is solved," he explained.
But the "customer service programme" was not made public until his slip-up caused it to be revealed unwittingly. Moreover, both Dr Borg Olivier and the Prime Minister had ignored questions about this matter from this newspaper and others over the last two weeks. When asked why it took him so long to comment, he said he was waiting for the "opportune moment".
This moment seems to have come in the form of Xarabank to be aired today in which, Dr Borg Olivier insisted, he would reveal how the PL compiles personal data of people on a daily basis, breaking the Data Protection Act.
Dr Borg Olivier warned Dr Muscat and Mr Micallef that by publishing the e-mail they broke the law because they revealed private information that was "misappropriated" because it was not intended to be seen by them in the first place.
Dr Muscat said that, following a telephone conversation with Prime Minister Lawrence Gonzi on Monday, the PL had accepted the person proposed to be appointed as Data Protection Commissioner to replace the late Paul Mifsud Cremona, who passed away last August. He stopped short of announcing the name, saying this was the Prime Minister's duty.
He said now that there was consensus on the person, the party had written to the new commissioner asking him to investigate the e-mail Dr Borg Olivier had sent and which, he insisted, was an attempt to spy on people submitting complaints to government departments.
Dr Muscat said it was worrying that there is absolutely no distinction between the party and the state. He said Dr Gonzi should shoulder the political responsibility of this e-mail which, he insisted, breaches citizens' data protection rights.
He said what was worse was that the coordination of the data collected from various ministries was going to be in the hands of two public officials at the Prime Minister's Office who are paid by public funds.