PN due diligence will not disqualify anyone

The forthcoming report by the Nationalist Party commission carrying out a due diligence of Adrian Delia’s and Bernard Grech’s candidature for the party leadership, will not include any recommendation on whether they should be allowed to contest or not. 

The PN secretary-general, Francis Zammit Dimech, confirmed that the vaunted due diligence vetting of the candidates – a recent addition to the newly-approved PN statute – will be limited to “an X-ray which gives a clear picture” of both candidates who will be contesting. 

But while the report will still be presented to both the Electoral Commission and the PN’s Administrative Council, the commission will stop short of taking a decision on whether any of these candidates is unsuitable to run in the PN leadership election. 

When asked whether this report will be published in full, Zammit Dimech replied that he personally believed that a summary, and not the full report, should be published.  

The new PN statute does not state whether the report should be published or not, but simply that it should be passed on to the Administrative Council and the Electoral Commission. 

It is also possible that one or both candidates will publish the report on their own initiative. 

The party statute itself clearly states that the commission auditing the candidates should not only issue a generic report, but actually recommend which candidates fulfil its criteria or not. 

According to the statute, the report should include “a declaration with motives on whether the interested members satisfy the criteria or not”. 

Subsequently the Electoral Commission would have to accept only the nominations of those candidates who have “been positively verified.”  

But contacted by MaltaToday, Francis Zammit Dimech explained that this will not be the case in this election. 

Zammit Dimech pointed out that this part of the statute would only come in force after the next general election, with transitory provisions applying to the election of deputy leaders that will not be applied to the election of a leader. 

The new statute’s rules on electing a party leader only come into effect after the next general election. Article 90, which governs the due diligence process, falls under the purview of Article 172 (3), which suspends Articles 89-99 until after the next general election.  

But significantly, Zammit Dimech referred to the decision not to exclude any of the two candidates on the basis of the due diligence report, as being rooted in “realpolitik”, recognising the “grave political implications” of stopping either of the two candidates from contesting at this stage. 

“The context is one of a particular election triggered by a vote in the party’s General Council and not following a general election as foreseen in the statute,” Zammit Dimech said, suggesting that the election was ‘ad hoc’ in nature. 

Had any of the two candidates been excluded on the basis of recommendations in the due diligence report, this would have led to a one-horse race, which according to the new statute would not have even required a vote among members but simply one among councillors. 

Yet even this is unclear, because no rules presently exist to regulate the election of a new leader before the next general election. 

While the due diligence poses a hurdle for the embattled incumbent whose financial affairs have been under scrutiny since 2017, any declaration that deems Adrian Delia fit to stand for the election will be interpreted as a vindication of his innocence. 

By not excluding any candidate on the basis of the due diligence report, the PN may have found a way out of the quandary, leaving up to members to evaluate the report which is expected to be finalised in the next weeks. 

But it could also leave the PN open to accusations of a vetting procedure that refuses to bite the bullet on which of the candidates are suitable to run for PN leader.