Government guidelines on e-mail use by Cabinet members are proving to be difficult to enforce.
Government sources said a policy whereby ministers and parliamentary secretaries are bound to send official e-mails via their @gov.mt addresses only had finally been drafted, months after the issue was first flagged in the previous legislature.
The matter had come to the fore last year after it emerged that Education Minister Evarist Bartolo had used his private e-mail account to discuss serious corruption claims.
Mr Bartolo had admitted that he should not have made use of a private Hotmail account to handle claims of abuse by a senior official at the Foundation for Tomorrow’s Schools.
Copies of an exchange of messages with former FTS CEO Philip Rizzo had been tabled in Parliament after Mr Bartolo quoted from it during a parliamentary statement at the height of the controversy.
Mr Rizzo had brought the e-mail issue to light when he advised the minister to “check his Hotmail” after Mr Bartolo disagreed on the reported timing of when he first got to know about the corruption allegations.
The government sources noted yesterday that although Cabinet members had been advised to only use their government e-mail account when conducting official business, “it’s not that simple”.
“The problem is that there are some who have long been using a particular address to conduct negotiations prior to even being elected to Parliament,” the sources noted.
They added that even if the guidelines, drafted in conjunction with the government information technology agency Mita, were made mandatory, it was virtually impossible to stop individual ministers from setting up a separate account.
A number of Cabinet members still use personal e-mail accounts even to conduct official government business although the sources said that, in some case, these were “tied” to their @gov.mt accounts.
When the e-mail issue had first been raised by Mr Rizzo, he had drawn parallels with US presidential candidate Hillary Clinton’s own well-publicised e-mail controversy, a major issue in the latest US election.
Ms Clinton had come under fire for using her family’s private e-mail server for official communications during her tenure as the United States’ Secretary of State rather than her official State Department accounts, which are maintained on federal servers. The communications had included thousands of e-mails that would retroactively be marked classified by US officials.