Election campaign expenses to be released next week

The campaign expenses of the five elected Maltese MEPs will be made public next week, the Electoral Commission said.

All five submitted their expenses breakdown to the Electoral Commission by last Friday and took an oath, as stipulated by the electoral law.

However, they have so far denied public access to their declarations, which, the Electoral Commission said, would published in the Government Gazette next week.

"As required by law, we should be publishing the list of all candidates who have submitted their expenses declarations to the Electoral Commission. From then onwards, members of the public can, if they so wish, come to our offices in Valletta and view the declarations," a commission spokesman said.

The electoral law lays down that a candidate in any election cannot spend more than €1,400 per district on promotion. Given that the MEP elections are fought across all districts in Malta and Gozo, the limit rises to over €18,000.

The Sunday Times has been pursuing this issue for the past eight weeks after an analysis revealed that at least eight MEP candidates may have exceeded the limit.

Two of the unelected candidates have already admitted they exceeded the threshold and are risking minimal consequences such as a fine. The stakes are much higher for elected candidates who could theoretically lose their seats if they are found to have broken the law.

Nationalist candidates Frank Portelli and Edward Demicoli declared they were unable to take an oath according to the form provided by the Electoral Commission. To do so, they insisted, would be to take a false oath.

Despite having said they remained within the €18,000 legal threshold requirement, all five elected MEPs have so far failed to meet a request by The Times to publish the declarations submitted sent to the commission.

The three Labour MEPs - Louis Grech, John Attard Montalto and Edward Scicluna - ignored an e-mail sent by The Times asking them to release the declarations. Nationalist MEPs Simon Busuttil and David Casa only referred The Times to the Electoral Commission.

During the inaugural session of the European Parliament in Strasbourg last week, both Nationalist and Labour MEPs criticised the rules as being too "ambiguous" and "out of date".

While insisting they respected the threshold during the last campaign, they called for an immediate change to the rules in order "to reflect better today's needs and reality."

The issue has been hitting the headlines after Mr Demicoli and later Dr Portelli admitted they had overshot the legal requirement in their respective campaigns.

Last Sunday, Mr Demicoli criticised the declarations made earlier by the elected MEPs saying they "had descended into Orwellian doublespeak".

"I am disappointed that my MEPs have decided to take this course of action. As for me, we had a moral obligation to tell the truth," he told The Sunday Times.

In a joint letter to Parliament Speaker Louis Galea, who chairs a parliamentary select committee on constitutional changes, Prime Minister Lawrence Gonzi and Opposition Leader Joseph Muscat attempted to quell the controversy by urging the committee to discuss the matter and come out with proposals for a revision of the rules on electoral expenditure.