Issue link: https://maltatoday.uberflip.com/i/1450614
3 maltatoday | SUNDAY • 13 FEBRUARY 2022 NEWS Ce althy bs not soluns Our free weight management programme will give you the necessary skills to maintain a healthy lifestyle. Nutri�on helpline 8007 3307 C M Y CM MY CY CMY K Piz Tajjeb tul Hajtek Newspaper Advert (Half Page) 2022 Final.pdf 2 09/02/2022 10:54:51 CONTINUED FROM PAGE 1 MaltaToday is reliably in- formed that One Productions, Labour media house, owes ARMS a total of €1.25 million in pending dues, while Media.Link, the PN's media company, owes ARMS €3.5 million. This newspaper is informed that while a payment schedule is in place for One Productions, little of the pending bill for Me- dia.Link has been settled as yet. MaltaToday had unsucessfully petitioned the courts to uphold a decision by the Information and Data Protection Appeals Tribunal that had decided that ARMS should acquiesce to a freedom of information request by this newspaper to reveal the outstanding bills that the PL and PN had with ARMS. The 2017 decision by the ap- peals tribunal came four years after MaltaToday filed its re- quest to ARMS. In 2014, MaltaToday reported that the Nationalist and Labour parties had outstanding bills of a combined €2.5 million, with €1.9 million owed by the PN. Since then, these bills grew, thanks to protracted terms of payment. While political parties retain an influential hold on public- ly-owned corporations, various clients who defaulted on their dues have been presented with judicial letters to pay up within a stipulated time, or have their services disconnected. MaltaToday insisted that un- like regular consumers, the two political parties contested dem- ocratic elections and ultimately selected who would be minister responsible for energy affairs. As such, this could allow them to negotiate better terms of re- payment of their bills. MaltaToday had told ARMS and the IDPC that consumers are at a disadvantage to political parties, which cannot be consid- ered "normal clients" as ARMS insists they are. Successful political parties whose candidates are then ap- pointed ministers, get to select the men and women who run ARMS, and its two shareholders, Enemalta and the Water Servic- es Corporation – a relationship between party and state that un- derlines the kind of power held by parties. ARMS refused MaltaToday's request, applying an Article 5 exemption that it was a com- mercial company owned by the government. The IDPC agreed, agreeing that the documents requested were "held by a commercial partner- ship in which the public author- ity has a controlling interest, in so far as the documents related to the commercial activities of the commercial partnership." MaltaToday appealed the re- fusal, saying the IDPC had not carried out an appropriate pub- lic interest test on whether dis- closing the information would be of more benefit to the public, than were it to be kept secret. The Appeals Tribunal, chaired by lawyer Anna Mallia, said the FOI Act's definition of public authority did not apply to cor- porations, but to ministries, departments and agencies in which the government had a controlling stake. "Additionally, the information requested does not concern documents related to ARMS's commercial opera- tions, but with its own clients, which are holding companies of the political parties." Mallia overturned the IDPC's decision, and ordered ARMS to furnish MaltaToday with its re- quested documents. Her deci- sion was later overturned by the Court of Appeal. Labour owes ARMS €1.25m, PN €3.5 million