Millions in pending bills: party stations owe ARMS €4.7m 

Elections are round the corner and the propaganda from the Labour and Nationalist party stations will be exhorting voters by fanning the sins of the opposing party.

But both TV stations today owe millions in unpaid electricity bills to ARMS, the water and energy billing company, once again showing political parties to be less adept at keeping their own house in order.  

MaltaToday is reliably informed 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 Media.Link has been settled as yet.

MaltaToday had unsuccessfully 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 appeals tribunal came four years after MaltaToday filed its request 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 publicly-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 unlike regular consumers, the two political parties contested democratic elections and ultimately selected who would be minister responsible for energy affairs. As such, this could allow them to negotiate better terms of repayment of their bills.

MaltaToday had told ARMS and the IDPC that consumers are at a disadvantage to political parties, which cannot be considered “normal clients” as ARMS insists they are.

Successful political parties whose candidates are then appointed ministers, get to select the men and women who run ARMS, and its two shareholders, Enemalta and the Water Services Corporation – a relationship between party and state that underlines the kind of power held by parties.

ARMS refused MaltaToday’s request, applying an Article 5 exemption that it was a commercial company owned by the government. The IDPC agreed, agreeing that the documents requested were “held by a commercial partnership in which the public authority has a controlling interest, in so far as the documents related to the commercial activities of the commercial partnership.”

MaltaToday appealed the refusal, saying the IDPC had not carried out an appropriate public interest test on whether disclosing 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 corporations, 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 operations, 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 requested documents. Her decision was later overturned by the Court of Appeal.