Karl Schembri
The Central Bank manager who has been outed by IT minister Austin Gatt as “the anonymous author” of Labour leader Joseph Muscat’s surcharge report, was only asked to give a second opinion on a document authored by someone else, party sources insist.
Sandro Demarco was accused by the minister in Parliament last Wednesday of having leaked sensitive Central Bank data that was not yet in the public domain, triggering an internal investigation by the bank’s audit committee.
But sources close to the Labour leadership say Demarco was only asked for “a second opinion” about an already compiled report, to which he added and edited some parts.
To do this, Demarco is said to have created a new document in which he pasted the report and added his suggestions, and sent it back to Labour. This meant that his name remained in the file’s properties as the author, which led Gatt to accuse him in Parliament of having written Muscat’s report.
The report was put on the Malta Labour Party’s website and on its news portal, Maltastar.com, but was removed some time later when party officials realised that Demarco’s name was featuring on the document in what turned out to be a massive blunder.
Still, Gatt had already acquired a copy of the document.
Gatt also accused Demarco of breaching the bank’s ethics in making sensitive information public, but the Central Bank governor, Michael Bonello, has refrained from confirming whether this was true.
According to Gatt, Demarco had access to the latest Harmonised Consumer Price Index figures that were as yet unreleased.
“I found that the author of the document is Sandro Demarco, a manager at the Central Bank of Malta, who works with confidential information related to the Harmonised Index of Consumer Prices,” Gatt said in Parliament. “He provided this confidential information to the MLP before it was published.”
The bank’s investigation is being led by the Chairman of the Bank’s Audit Committee, who will appoint experts to assist him.

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