Ministers should not use the Department of Information to issue statements related to their private affairs or which were partisan in tone, the Commissioner of Standards in Public Life has said.

Commissioner George Hyzler said that the DOI should consider drafting a policy which would make it clear that the department’s role was to issue “factual, non-partisan and authoritative” statements.

The Commissioner’s ruling comes after Tourism Minister Konrad Mizzi had issued a statement announcing that he was withdrawing several libel suits related to money-laundering accusations against him.

In his statement, issued through the DOI on February 6, the minister had accused opponents of “mud-slinging” and weaving a “web of deceit”.

What the Commissioner found

Those phrases are not appropriate for statements issued through the DOI, Commissioner George Hyzler said.

“The DOI should be jealous of its political impartiality,” the Commissioner said.

“DOI statements should be as factual, non-partisan and authoritative as possible”.

In the course of his investigation, the Commissioner interviewed Dr Mizzi, who said he was not aware of any DOI guidelines regarding press releases and argued that the statement he had issued was in the public interest.

The minister, through his lawyer, also submitted several examples of DOI press releases issued when the Nationalist Party was in office and which contained similarly partisan language.

The Commissioner said that the minister was right to say that there was no policy regulating DOI press releases, though he disagreed with the minister’s assessment that his decision to withdraw libel suits was a matter of public interest.

The fact that the DOI has historically been used by governments to further their partisan interests was irrelevant, he said.

Even if this was a well-established custom in Maltese politics, the Commissioner said, it was not correct and should be stopped.

Dr Hyzler said he was closing the case, after receiving confirmation from the minister that he would be speaking to his officers to make them more sensitive to the distinction between official and private or partisan statements.

He also called on the DOI to consider drafting a policy to ensure such statements were explicitly discouraged. 

The investigation began following a complaint filed by lawyer Andrew Borg Cardona.

Read the full report in the PDF below.