A White Paper on political party financing will be published today, the Prime Minister said, nearly 20 years after a first attempt was made at coming up with a set of agreed rules.
This is the third measure aimed at restoring transparency in local politics, following the publication of the Whistleblower’s Act and the removal of time-barring in cases of political corruption, Joseph Muscat told a Labour Party audience at headquarters in Ħamrun yesterday.
“We need strict rules for parties and candidates because we have to put people’s minds at rest that there are no obligations to anyone.
“Donations have to be regulated and this will give a transparent basis to local politics,” he said.
Malta, he added, could no longer continue to be singled out as one of the very few countries that have no party financing rules.
Only a handful of Council of Europe member states still allow anonymous party and campaign financing, and Malta is one of them.
In a 1995 cross-party initiative, the Galdes Commission proposed that donations to political parties above €11,647 be made public and those exceeding €23,294 be illegal, among other rules.
But despite an agreement on the principle of transparency in party financing, the parties failed to agree on the finer details and the Galdes report was shelved.
Party financing was a hot potato towards the end of the last legislature when rebel Nationalist MP Franco Debono was tasked with preparing a draft Bill on the subject.
The proposal being published today is based on Dr Debono’s draft which he had presented as a Private Member’s Bill in January 2012, after the Nationalist government of the time did not take up his report.
‘We did not want to put spokes in PN wheels’
Dr Debono’s proposals stipulated that political parties must register all donations exceeding €300 made by any one source during a calendar year.
It had also called for the names of donors to be made public when aggregate donations added up to more than €7,000.
The Bill made donations of more than €50,000 in one year illegal and introduced restrictions on individual candidate spending during election campaigns.
Dr Muscat did not give any details of the rules being published today but said this was part of the big reform with the aim of making Malta “a truly European country”.
He said the government had allowed the PN enough time to tackle its financial problems. It had waited until now so as not to be accused of putting spokes in its wheels.
Controls on political party financing have become more pressing in the wake of damning testimony given in court and in the Public Accounts Committee by oil trader George Farrugia, who said that he had given gifts to ministers and political parties.