Last year, Kaxxaturi launched two important campaigns. There was our campaign against party-owned TV stations and our campaign against illegal use of taxpayer money on the personal Facebook pages of ministers.
It’s thanks to this second campaign that our ministries today have their own Facebook pages like saħħa. In the past, we would get official information on the personal pages of ministers instead and millions of euro were being spent on building the following of these personal pages.
We got the Standards Commissioner to investigate this practice and he confirmed it was widespread. The police told us they were investigating the matter on grounds of misappropriation of funds.
But we wanted to find out for ourselves exactly how much money was spent on such pages, so we filed a number of Freedom of Information requests. Eight months later, we still have no answers.
Our FOI requests were rejected twice and when we filed a complaint with the Information and Data Protection Commissioner, he took six months to give a ruling only to defend the veil of secrecy using the banal excuse that ministries have no access to the information.
We’re going to be contesting this decision at the Information and Data Protection Tribunal. But to do this we need your help. We need to raise €1,000 in two weeks to file an appeal.
If you want more information about the decision by the Data Protection Commissioner check it out here:
Remember, there can be no real democracy if our own taxes are used for illegal propaganda, whether online or on TV.