News | Wednesday, 02 December 2009

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Central Bank employee cleared of Austin Gatt’s accusations

James Debono
Central Bank employee Sandro Demarco, whom Investments Minsiter Austin Gatt last year accused of passing confidential information to Labour leader Joseph Muscat, claims that a report clearing his name of accusations was kept under wraps for a whole year by the Central Bank governor Michael Bonello.
Demarco made this claim in a judicial protest presented this week against the Central Bank governor by lawyer Paul Lia.
Last November, Gatt had accused Demarco in Parliament of breaching the bank’s ethics in passing on sensitive information to the PL leader.
He said Demarco had access to the latest Harmonised Consumer Price Index figures that were at the time still unreleased, and which he allegedly “leaked” to Muscat in a report that he wrote for him.
“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 had said in Parliament. “He provided this confidential information to the MLP before it was published.”
But in his judicial protest against the Central Bank Governor, Demarco claims that a report by an Audit Committee, which had cleared his name of any wrongdoing has been kept secret since 15 December 2008.
Instead of protecting Demarco’s “integrity and loyalty in carrying out his duties, the governor of the central bank chose to keep the report secret and persist in taking disciplinary procedures against him with the excuse that he had embarrassed the bank,” Demarco claims in the judicial protest.
It was at this stage that the Disciplinary Board revealed that the allegations against Demarco had already been “declared to be conclusively unfounded by an Investigation Team appositely set up by the Bank.”
The Disciplinary Board concluded that “a calm objective assessment of the relevant facts and the sequence of events would not indicate that there has been a conflict of interest, let alone any dishonesty or lack of professional integrity by Mr. Demarco.”
Demarco claims that the information he was accused of leaking did not even exist in the central bank, and that the Labour Party’s documents were based on information which was already made available to the public in presentations by KPMG and Minister Gatt to the Malta Council of Economic and Social Development.
Demarco is now calling on the governor to publish the report of the Audit committee and held the governor responsible for the damages he sustained as a result of the fact that the report was kept secret for a year while he still he had to confront disciplinary procedures.
In February the bank’s external relations officer, Alexander Borg, claimed that internal investigations on this case were still ongoing.
Labour leader Jospeh Muscat had denied Gatt’s claims, saying Demarco was only asked to give a second opinion on a document authored by someone else.

The report quoted by Gatt was put on the PL’s website and on Maltastar.com, but was removed some time later when party officials realised that Demarco’s name was featuring on the document.

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