Gozo candidate at centre of ‘ghost NGO’ storm

The Gozo Youth Council is embroiled in a controversy that its members are being propped up by ghost NGOs, and right in the thick of it is the PN’s new election candidate, Ryan Mercieca. 

The GYC was set up in 2014, with a statute requiring its 11 executive members to be nominated by a Gozitan youth NGO that is registered with the Gozo NGO Association – an umbrella group for Gozitan NGOs of which Mercieca is secretary-general. 

Unlike their counterparts in the Maltese Youth Council, the GYC’s affiliated NGOs are not required to register with the Commissioner of NGOs, which verifies operations and financial set-ups of registered NGOs.

Mercieca was elected as the GYC’s first president, nominated by the Gozo University Group, but he resigned a few months later when he was taken on by the Nationalist Party as an election candidate. However, he maintained his position as project manager of ‘iLead’ – a youth leadership training scheme for which the GYC had been granted some €50,000 in EEA funds. 

In 2016, despite no longer being officially involved in the GYC, Mercieca was listed as its contact person for a second approved youth leadership training scheme – this time worth €76,505 of EU funds.  

An email seen by MaltaToday shows that Mercieca had originally intended to contest this year’s GYC elections, this time under the name of an NGO called ‘Innovative Youths Gozo’. It was supposed to have been a seamless annual general meeting – 11 candidates for 11 positions – and this newspaper is informed that Mercieca had intended to regain his old position as council president.

Apart from Mercieca, the original list included four other members of the Gozo NGO Association’s executive.  

Yet a Pandora’s box was about to be opened once the Gozo University Group (GUG) found out that its nominee, Manuel Xuereb, had missed the final cut because the organisation had not paid a €30 membership fee to the Gozo NGO Association – as required by the GYC statute.

Scanning the list of approved nominees, the GUG was astonished to find that a certain Francesca Marie Attard had been nominated by Students’ Voice – a subcommittee within GUG itself – that had changed name the previous year, and for whom the GUG did not pay the €30 membership fee.

In an email seen by MaltaToday, Daniel Cassar – headmaster of the Gozo 6th Form, where Students’ Voice was founded – confirmed that the subcommittee had been disbanded and that he had personally asked that its bank account be closed. He added that he had created Students’ Voice to serve as a voice for Gozitan 6th form students but that it had been subsequently “hijacked” by GUG and its president, at the time Ryan Mercieca. 

Xuereb approached the Gozo NGO Association, which confirmed that none of the 11 approved NGOs had paid the fee either. He then challenged the GYC with this information, and it postponed the AGM by two weeks to give all organisations a chance to pay the fee. 

However, the presence of Students’ Voice in the list also gave weight to long-held suspicions that several of the NGOs that nominated youths to the council, do not actually exist. 

In recent e-mail correspondence seen by MaltaToday, Victoria mayor Samuel Azzopardi denied the existence of the ‘Victoria Youth Group’ – which had nominated a member to the GYC.

Similarly, the Xaghra local council denied the existence of the ‘Xaghra Youth Group’ and the president of the youth organisation Rotaract Malta confirmed that its Gozitan branch had been defunct for over a year.

Moreover, sources close to the GYC told MaltaToday that the so-called ‘Gozo Musicians’ Association’ and ‘Gozo Youth Radio Broadcasters’ are non-existent, and indeed a simple Google search reveals no information whatsoever on them.

There is also barely any online trace of Mercieca’s own ‘Innovative Youths Gozo’ – merely a profile on a website for EU youth entrepreneurs, with its contact details listed as Mercieca’s personal email and mobile number. 

MaltaToday can confirm that none of these ‘organisations’ is registered with the NGO Commissioner. 

Mercieca’s council nomination silently withdrawn

Around this time, Mercieca found himself the target of political controversy when he allegedly threatened the Gozo NGO Association’s treasurer, Joe Camilleri, during a libel case. 

Mercieca – also the association’s secretary – had sued It-Torca for libel over a report that he had failed to produce documents related to EU funds received by the association. On 23 January, Camilleri testified as a witness and said that Mercieca was in charge of funding for the association’s projects and that Mercieca’s policy was to hand over to the authorities all invoices and receipts related to a project once it was completed. 

A couple of minutes after the case was adjourned, Camilleri and Mercieca clashed in the courtroom corridors and were hauled back inside. Camilleri told the magistrate that Mercieca had asked him whether he had been given permission to exhibit association documents in court.

Camilleri allegedly replied that he had spoken to the NGO association’s president, Saviour Grech, and Mercieca warned him: “You’ll get what’s coming to you” (issa gejja tieghek). 

Back in Gozo, the GYC’s re-scheduled AGM was coming up and on 16 February it released an updated list of 12 nominees, this time including Manuel Xuereb’s name.

There were some other notable changes to the final list, and indeed it did not include the under-pressure Mercieca, who had by then rescinded his nomination. Instead, ‘Innovative Youths Gozo’ – which by then was listed as ‘Innovative Gozo Youths’ – nominated Mercieca’s girlfriend, Marie Cefai. 

The original nominee for Students’ Voice, Francesca Marie Attard, was now listed as the nominee for ‘Xaghra Youth Group’, and the defunct subcommittee instead nominated Charlene Debrincat, who is also a member of the Gozo NGO Association. 

Debrincat did not attend the AGM because she was abroad, and therefore all questions asked about Students’ Voice during the AGM were dismissed on the ground that its nominee was not present to answer them. 

As can be read in the minutes, Xuereb responded by filing a motion calling for all 12 nominees to declare on the spot the names of their organisations’ presidents, secretaries and treasurers. The motion failed, with four votes in favour and 11 against.

Eman Borg, a member of the Gozo NGO Association executive who had been touted as the next GYC president but who resigned from the council hours after MaltaToday sent a set of questions to Mercieca, argued that the release of such information “would breach the Data Protection Act”.

MaltaToday is also informed by separate sources that a separate motion was passed that had called for the statute to be changed so as to render Gozitan NGOs’ registration with the NGO Commissioner a prerequisite.

However, this amendment was inexplicably left out of the minutes and the GYC’s updated statute. NGO Commissioner Kenneth Wain confirmed with MaltaToday that he is now investigating whether the 11 Gozitan NGOs represented on the council do in fact have statutes and lists of president, secretary and treasurer as required by the GYC statute.

Confusion over leadership scheme project

As stated earlier, Mercieca had previously worked as a project manager for iLead, a scheme aimed at teaching leadership skills to Gozitan youths for which the GYC was awarded some €50,000 in EEA funds.

In its two-paragraph annual report for 2016, the GYC said that the project was spread over 10 sessions in 10 months, culminating in a final conference in March 2016. Before the project started, Mercieca said that he would receive €25,397 in personal wages, while €7,430 would be spent on travel and subsistence allowance, €5,056 in equipment costs, €1,068 on “consumables, supplies and general services”, €9,440 on subcontracting costs, €1,274 on promotional costs, and €4,956 on lecturer fees.

However, the GYC did not grant a final breakdown of the project’s expenditure in this year’s AGM. When asked about it, the GYC’s outgoing finance officer and PN’s Munxar local councillor Damien Spiteri said that he did not have the information in hand and that it is now the responsibility of the GYC’s new executive to release them. 

The financial statement for 2016 that the GYC did release in its AGM is laughably short of detail – claiming €0 in income and €154 in expenditure on advertising and taxes. 

The NGO Commission also confirmed that the GYC has not yet filed its annual reports for 2015 and 2016, the years the iLead project had taken place. 

MaltaToday managed to get its hands on a scanned copy of the GYC’s bank statement for the period between January and May 2015. It shows regular withdrawals of cheques – numbered ‘Cheque 4’, ‘Cheque 3’, ‘Cheque 5’ etc with no further details – amounting to over €15,000 in withdrawals over the six months and ranging from a tiny withdrawal of €4.86 to a more significant €4,000. A €4,500 payment is also shown as coming in from SOS Malta – a human rights NGO that co-financed the iLead project.

Sources close to the GYC told MaltaToday that the council had no major source of income that year other than the iLead project, raising suspicion that the cheques came out of that scheme.  

A separate bank statement shows that GYC had in October 2016 received €61,204 in EUPA funds for a new youth leadership project – money which was not declared in its financial statement for last year.

Mercieca responds: ‘Ask the Council, not me’

MaltaToday sent a raft of questions to Mercieca – including requests for copies of the statutes, as well as the names of the president, secretary and treasurer of the seven ‘ghost’ NGOs, and for a full breakdown of costs of the iLead project including his personal salary.

However, Mercieca said that such questions should be directed to GYC as he is not a member of the executive committee.

When asked simply how he responds to allegations that seven NGOs – including his own ‘Innovative Youths Gozo’ – do not exist, he similarly said that such questions should be sent to the GYC. 

When asked why he was listed as the contact person for the EUPA scheme in 2016 although he was no longer part of the GYC, Mercieca responded: “I am a freelance consultant for European Funding and Project Management where I have managed projects successfully on a national and international level... the GYC can provide all the details in relation to the project”.

When asked what vetting the Gozo NGO Association conducted on the council’s NGOs, he vaguely responded that ‘the association has its own rules and statutes with which it abides”. 

Most notably, when asked why he withdrew his original nomination for this year’s AGM, Mercieca claimed that “I did not withdraw my nomination but I decided not to contest since my priority is to dedicate my time for all Gozitans as a PN candidate”.

This of course contrasts sharply with an email published by MaltaToday which clearly shows that Mercieca was one of the original 11 nominees.