Oct 22 - GSD Calls For Openness In Speaker Report Leak
The GSD has today said that the refusal of the Chief Minister to publish or even provide members of the Opposition with a copy of the report on the investigation into the leak of the tax affairs of the former Speaker of Parliament is a “testament to how far this Government has fallen short of its New Dawn mantra of openness and transparency.”
It will be recalled, says the Opposition, that in 2012 someone leaked confidential information in the form of a report produced by the Commissioner of Income Tax Office relating to the former Speaker of Parliament to GBC. Shortly afterwards, the Government announced that an internal enquiry was being conducted. At the time, the then Leader of the Opposition, Sir Peter Caruana, told Parliament that the Opposition was not happy with the fact that an internal enquiry was being conducted. He told Parliament: “Frankly for the Government itself to call an enquiry into the leaking of the report, a report which can only have been leaked either by a civil servant in the Income Tax Office, by a civil servant in the office of the Chief Minister to whom the report was sent or, for the sake of equanimity, by the Chief Minister or by somebody whom the Chief Minister gave a copy – it cannot be anybody else: one of the four must be the source of the leak! - I believe is a very serious matter which needs a degree of independent parliamentary enquiry and investigation and not an investigation by the very institution that has to account and explain and justify and demonstrate that its fingerprints are not on this matter”.
In June 2013, the Chief Minister told Parliament that the investigation had concluded. On several occasions thereafter, the Leader of the Opposition Daniel Feetham has asked whether the report on that investigation had also been finalised and whether it would be made public. The response has always been, says the GSD, that the report had not yet been finalised but that no commitment to publication could be given because it might lead to a criminal investigation. The reality, however, argues the GSD, is that if the Commissioner of Income Tax had found any evidence that needed to be referred to the RGP he would have done so when the investigation concluded in 2013 and not over a year later.
Now that the investigation report has been finished, the Opposition says that it has been informed that it is up to the Chief Secretary whether the report is disclosed to Members of the Opposition.
A statement from the GSD concluded: “In the UK a leak of a confidential report produced by a Senior Civil Servant into the affairs of the Speaker of Parliament would have led to a serious Parliamentary enquiry with sessions conducted in public and a report that would have been made public. It is over two years after this unfortunate episode first arose but the issue remains as murky and as concerning to the Opposition as it did at the outset. The refusal of the Chief Minister to be open about this just adds to that concern. We again call for publication of the report.”
