Any agreements between the utilities payment agency and the big political parties will not be made public as they are excluded from the Freedom of Information Act.
A Times of Malta request to see the documents has been turned down and it will remain a secret whether the major parties actually pay water and electricity bills or whether they have some kind of agreement with ARMS Ltd.
Last April, Times of Malta asked the Nationalist and Labour parties whether they had any outstanding water and electricity bills following information that both were behind on their payments.
Details were not forthcoming so Times of Malta filed a request under the Freedom of Information Act to find out what agreements the agency had with political parties.
ARMS Ltd refused the request, saying the law did not apply to “documents that are held by a commercial partnership in which the government or another public authority has a controlling interest, in so far as the documents in question relate to the commercial activities of the commercial partnership”.
The FOI request was also refused on appeal and this decision was upheld by Information and Data Protection Commissioner Joseph Ebejer, who ruled that agreements already signed or that may be signed in the future “are excluded from the scope of the Act”.
In his decision, Mr Ebejer quoted the same article of the FOI Act as cited by ARMS.
Mr Ebejer therefore ruled that ARMS Ltd’s refusal to allow access to these documents was “justified and in full compliance with the provisions of the Freedom of Information Act”.
In its reply back in April, the Labour Party had said that it would be publishing its accounts “as usual” but when the party issued an abridged version of its accounts, there was no mention of water and electricity bills.
The Nationalist Party said this was a commercial matter involving the operations of its companies and “the agreements these companies have with public entities”.
Party finances were a hot issue during the election campaign, especially afterwards, when Times of Malta exposed the PN’s dire financial situation.
Labour, which ran a well-funded electoral campaign, has promised to introduce a party financing law to regulate donations by this month.