PN candidate denies signature fraud in NGO storm

Nationalist Party election candidate Ryan Mercieca has been accused of using a forged signature to land the position of secretary-general of the Gozo NGO Association – an umbrella group for Gozitan NGOs.

MaltaToday is in possession of an application form that Mercieca had filed in July 2016, in which he was nominated to the Gozo NGO Association by ‘Innovative Gozo’ – an allegedly false NGO. 

A third person is listed as the NGO’s president, along with his mobile number, e-mail address and a signature.

When contacted by MaltaToday, the person – who spoke to this newspaper on condition of anonymity – confirmed that the signature wasn’t his and that he was never involved in ‘Innovative Gozo’.

“No one asked me for permission for my name to be used in the form, and I only found out about it when a third person brought it to my attention,” he said. 

Contacted by MaltaToday, Mercieca flatly denied that he had made use of a forged signature and decried the allegation as a lie. “Just because someone told you it’s true doesn’t make it so. I can tell you that it’s a lie.”

Mercieca resigned as secretary-general of the Gozo NGO Association earlier this month, citing “ethical reasons” due to the fact that he would soon submit his nomination as a PN candidate.

The signature fraud accusations will add weight to suspicion that Mercieca’s ‘Innovative Gozo’ is a false NGO. Indeed, it is not registered with the NGOs Commissioner, and there is barely any online trace of it except for a profile on a website for EU youth entrepreneurs, with its contact details listed as Ryan Mercieca’s personal address, email and mobile number.

However, Mercieca insisted with MaltaToday that the NGO does exist and that it includes a number of members, although he refused to disclose their names. He referred to a recent investigation by NGO Commissioner Kenneth Wain into seven alleged ghost NGOs represented at the Gozo Youth Council, which did not find proof that Innovative Gozo is inexistent.

Ryan Mercieca has denied accusations of forging signatures to get elected to the Gozo NGO Association

Gozo youth council disbanded

Wain was called in after some youths raised doubts over the legitimacy of nine of the 11 NGOs of the Gozo Youth Council, which – since its formation in 2014 – has benefitted from €126,505 in EU and EEA funds for two separate youth leadership training schemes, both spearheaded by Mercieca.

A breakdown of the costs of the first project, iLead, is still in the dark and was not included in the council’s financial report for 2016.

Wain disbanded the GYC after finding sufficient proof that one of the NGOs represented on the council – Students’ Voice – was defunct and that the existence of another NGO (Xaghra Youth Groups) was dubious. Although he could not find proof that the other eight NGOs were false, he noted that the administrative reports they had presented to him were “generally very weak and uneven and in most cases do not report the activities of the organisations satisfactorily”.

None of the statutes of the allegedly false NGOs was signed as needed by NGO law, because – unlike their counterparts in the Maltese Youth Council – the GYC’s affiliated NGOs are not required to register with the NGO Commissioner, but with the Gozo NGO Association.

Yet, apart from Mercieca, the NGO Association’s 13-person executive until recently also included four youths who also sat on the GYC, three of whom were represented on behalf of allegedly false NGOs. 

One of them, Joseph Mercieca, was nominated to the Gozo NGO Association by ‘Victoria Youth Group’, with Ryan Mercieca listed as the president of the organisation. In recent e-mail correspondence seen by MaltaToday, Victoria mayor Samuel Azzopardi (PN) actually denied the existence of a ‘Victoria Youth Group’. 

Another one, Charlene Debrincat, was represented on the GYC by Students’ Voice – the NGO that Wain confirmed was defunct. She was nominated to the Gozo NGO Association not by Students’ Voice, but by the Gozo Musicians’ Association – another allegedly false NGO that had also nominated another person to the GYC.

When asked by MaltaToday, Mercieca played down concerns of intimacy between the GYC and the Gozo NGO Association, arguing that the GYC members had only been members of the Association for around a year. Moreover, he said that all the NGO Association executives had the opportunity to flag any shortcomings or concerns in registration applications by NGOs.