The Speaker, Anġlu Farrugia, has left it up to the members of the Public Accounts Committee to reach an agreement on how to proceed in the scrutiny of the government’s contracts with Henley & Partners on the Individual Investor Programme.

Dr Farrugia based his ruling on the fact that the copy of the contracts tabled at the committee – with what the government termed as “commercially sensitive clauses” blacked out – had been passed on to PAC chairman Tonio Fenech by a member of the Executive without the committee having reached any agreement on how the documents were to be presented and discussed.

In the circumstances, the committee’s members should go by what had been done in the meeting of February 18.

Dr Farrugia was delivering his ruling after having been asked by Mr Fenech to provide guidelines on the interpretation of the former’s ruling of May 19, 2014.

The Speaker said that, since the copy of the contracts had been passed on by the Executive, his procedural ruling in May did not apply. The procedure would have been adopted only if the PAC had agreed that the contracts should be tabled in full. But that agreement had never been reached.

Dr Farrugia said this was “an unhappy situation” and the committee should come to a consensus on the way forward.

So long as such consensus remained elusive, the PAC chairman would have no power to scrutinise the Executive’s decision.

He would have had this power if the committee had a priori decided that the contracts should be published in full.