Home Affairs Minister Manuel Mallia announced that arrangements were being made for a meeting to be held with the Ombudsman to discuss their disagreement over whether the Office of the Ombudsman enjoyed the jurisdiction to consider complaints filed by AFM officers.

The matter would be discussed civilly, as it should have from the beginning.

He said this controversy had been a long time coming as there were documents showing that former Prime Minister Lawrence Gonzi agreed with the present government’s position. If things were to be done differently, then the law had to change.

The PN was trying to make a big, new political issue of this, as if it hadn’t known about it and hadn’t done the same while in government. Dr Mallia said the Ombudsman was asking the government to act against the law, adding that the leader of the Opposition had not made a single legal point to back his argument.

Unless an AFM officer had exhausted the means of lodging a complaint, the Ombudsman was not in a position to investigate, Dr Mallia said. The law held that if the officer felt he had suffered an injustice his first resort was to turn to his Commander and if this got nowhere to lodge a complaint through the minister who could in turn report the case to the President to deliberate.

Yet the Ombudsman wanted the government to give him information to investigate, when the law clearly stated he could not intervene at this stage. One AFM officer had gone directly to the President, who was deliberating the case.

The government was merely abiding by the law and Dr Mallia said he was flabbergasted by the Opposition, which could not understand the situation and was trying to score political advantage.

It was trying to fool the people by telling them that the issue had been raised only now. In fact it had arisen when the present Ombudsman, under the PN adminis-tration, had sought to interpret the law differently.

The ministry could not provide the Ombudsman with the information he requested because the law did not empower the minister to do so. Dr Mallia said whoever believed he suffered an injustice should file a complaint. It was the government that would introduce the right for members of the Armed Forces to join a union and the people would not believe the Opposition when it said the government did not consider people’s injustices.

Enemalta minutes

In yesterday’s report ‘Hedging at Enemalta was an uphill struggle, accounts committee is told’, it was mistakenly reported that no minutes used to be taken at Enemalta board meetings between 1999 and 2003. In fact they were, as stated by the former board member testifying before Parliament’s Public Accounts Committee, Joe Falzon. The error is regretted.