Editorial

None of the serving Maltese MEPs want you, the people who they are asking to vote for them on Saturday, to know how much they have spent on their campaign. Nor do most of the other candidates.

The Sunday Times put the question to 33 candidates in recent days for two reasons: one, because the law states there is a spending limit of just over €18,000 per candidate and they must sign an affidavit to say they have not exceeded this figure; two, because the issue of how much members/candidates spend on all sorts of things has become even more relevant thanks to the British MPs' expenses scandal.

Just a handful of the EP candidates - their names are listed in our story today - came back with the figures we requested. And only four of those come from the main two parties. This is shameful.

The large majority of Labour's candidates did not feel compelled to respond. Most of them simply ignored us despite several attempts on our part to obtain the information. At best this is arrogance, at worst it is an attempt to conceal the state of affairs.

Most of the Nationalist Party's candidates did give us a response. But it was one that left us none the wiser. One by one they rolled in with the stock reply: "I am very taken up with the demands of the election campaign and am... unable to give you a comprehensive... account of the expenses incurred" until after the election. In other words, when it is too late for any critical comments to affect their electoral chances.

Was it coincidence that they all thought of the same thing to say? Hardly. Thanks to yet another e-mail blunder which the PN is now becoming famous for, it was revealed to us that this stock phrase came from Simon Busuttil's right-hand man, Stefano Mallia, who - bizarrely, since he is closely associated with the PN's star candidate - was appointed to head the campaign for all the candidates.

Edward Demicoli deserves some credit for admitting he exceeded the limit, which, let's face it, is too low for this election - never mind the ridiculous limit for our general elections.

While Alan Deidun and Rudolph Cini deserve credit for ignoring the party directive. And though the latter two are undoubtedly "taken up with the demands" of their campaign, their support staff - if they have any at all - is much smaller than many of the other party candidates, particularly the serving MEPs who have people in abundance to write articles for them and do a million and one other things.

The PN candidates' stock response, and the way we can confirm it was transmitted to them, blows apart another myth which the party has sought to propagate during the course of the campaign: that its candidates are disparate (the spirit of Freud wanted to type 'desperate'). They may have attempted to be so at the beginning of their journey, but their outspoken views on anything from car tax to hunting seemed to disappear long ago.

We cannot rule out that the Labour candidates were instructed by their party to take the same approach, but if that is the case they were not careless enough to reveal it to us.

However, if our EP candidates cannot be transparent about how much they spent during their campaign now - before the vote, when it counts - how can we trust them with the huge sums made available through European taxpayers' money when they become MEPs?