The Council of Europe slammed Malta’s continued lack of progress on regulating party financing and is far from impressed by the recent draft Bill intended to put the island’s house in order.
Malta has only just started working on regulating party funding after many years of discussions, reports and political bickering. It remains one of the most unregulated countries in Europe.
Although the European human rights organisation acknowledged the progress the country made by drafting the Bill, it described the situation as “globally unsatisfactory”.
Malta has not made any tangible progress on transparency
An evaluation report was published yesterday on Malta’s progress to implement recommendations made many years ago on political funding transparency.
The Group of States Against Corruption (Greco), part of the C of E, said it was “deeply concerned that, four years since the adoption of the last evaluation report, a comprehensive legal famework for regulating political financing continued to be missing in Malta”.
Welcoming the attention the new Labour government gave to the matter by presenting a draft Bill – an improvement over the previous one by the Nationalist administration in 2011 – Greco said it remained dissatisfied that its recommendations failed to be fully addressed.
Encouraging Maltese authorities to “pursue their efforts vigorously and to better align draft legislation to the [CoE] recommendations”, the report highlighted areas where more changes were necessary.
These include the need to substantially reduce the threshold for disclosing donations to political parties, currently set at €7,000, and to introduce a ban on anonymous donations.
Greco also wanted the new legislation to include rules on the presentation of political parties’ annual account statements to the Electoral Commission and their subsequent disclosure to the public.
Malta ‘not in compliance’
Other improvements include further refining the Elec-toral Commission’s supervisory mandate and striking a balance between criminal and administrative penalties.
“Malta has not made any tangible progress on the transparency of party funding as compared to the situation assessed more than two years ago,” the report concluded.
It said that none of the six recommendations “has been implemented satisfactorily or dealt with in a satisfactory manner”.
“Under these circumstances, Greco has no choice but to consider the situation as globally unsatisfactory and not in compliance,” it added.
In view of its assessment, the CoE has requested Malta to report on the progress made by the end of June.
| CoE recommendation | Implementation | Status |
| Parties and candidates to disclose individual donations and to ban donations from unidentified sources. | Disclosure threshold very high and has to be decreased. Anonymous donations still allowed. | Unsatisfactory |
| Introduce rules for parties to keep proper books. | The new Bill provides sufficient framework to keep full and transparent books. | Partly implemented |
| Publication of political parties’ accounts and provide access to public. | Proposed law partly meets requirements of recommendation and no mention of how accounts are to be presented to public. | Unsatisfactory |
| Ensure independent auditing. | Auditing proposed in Bill but not yet approved by Parliament. | Partly implemented |
| Effectively ensure independent monitoring of funding of political parties and electoral campaigns. | Mandate and powers of Electoral Commission in respect of monitoring need to be more clearly defined. | Unsatisfactory |
| Rules on party/electoral funding have to be accompanied by effective sanctions. | The new law foresees flexible penalties but it might be beneficial to consider seeking further balance between criminal and administrative penalties. | Unsatisfactory |