Malta has made “moderate progress” in regulating party financing, but a Bill presented last year is lacking in certain “critical areas” such as anonymous donations, a Council of Europe report has concluded.
Presented by the Group of States against Corruption (Greco) – an entity within the Council of Europe – the report evaluated Malta’s efforts to implement six recommendations it had made in 2003.
The recommendations called for the introduction of general requirements for both political parties and election candidates to disclose all individual donations (including those of a non-monetary nature) above a certain value. These included the donor’s identity, a revision of candidates’ spending limits on campaigns and a general ban on anonymous donations.
Other recommendations were to introduce rules obliging parties to keep proper books and accounts and the development of a coordinated approach for the publication of party accounts to facilitate the public’s access to such documents.
It was also suggested to have independent auditing of political parties and to monitor funding of election campaigns.
Greco also recommended that the changes would have to be accompanied with effective and proportionate sanctions in case of any breaches.
Presented in June of last year, the Party Financing Bill proposed a ban on donations exceed-ing €40,000.
Parties, it is being suggested, would only be obliged to list donations in their annual financial statements if these exceed €7,000.
Anonymous donations would still be allowed but only up to €50.
In the remaining cases, parties would have to keep a record of each financial contribution it had received.
The draft law also proposed an upward revision of candidates’ spending limit up to €20,000 for each district they contested, warning that false declarations could result in the loss of their parliamentary seat.
In its reaction, Greco welcomed the Bill but also pointed out that in certain aspects it did not meet requirements.
“The draft legislation however remains to be aligned with Recommendation Rec(2003)4 in a number of critical areas, namely by providing for the registration of all donations received, prohibiting anonymous donations, substantially reducing the threshold for donations disclosure, developing rules on the presentation and publication of annual statements of accounts and of information on elections-related income and expenditure, and introducing more consistent and clear rules on the financing of, reporting by and control over income and expenditure of independent election candidates,” the report said.
It added that the delay in enacting the law meant that the current level of compliance with the six recommendations remained “globally unsatisfactory”.
Consequently, Malta was asked to present a report outlining the progress made in these areas.
Though the original plan was to enact this law at the beginning of this year, the process has been delayed by a lengthy parliamentary debate, which still needs to clear the final hurdle – the committee stage.