Data Commissioner has right to access contracts of government consultants - appeals tribunal

Economy Minister Chris Cardona has lost his legal attempt to stop the Data Protection Commissioner from accessing details of his consultants’ contracts and was ordered to submit all the documentation requested. In a decision handed down by the Information and Data Protection Appeals Tribunal, chaired by Anna Mallia, it was decided that the Data Protection Commissioner has every right to issue enforcement orders when a government ministry does not comply. The tribunal rejected all the arguments made by Dr Cardona’s lawyer, Nadine Lia, herself a consultant at the ministry, reiterating that it is up to the Data Protection Commissioner to decide whether a contract should be published or not. Among her objections, Dr Lia had argued that the people employed by the minister as consultants, paid by taxpayers, should not have their contracts published as their terms were “private and confidential”. The issue goes back to over a year ago when Times of Malta had submitted a request under the Freedom of Information Act to obtain the contracts of the minister’s advisors after it was discovered that Dr Cardona’s former chief of staff, Mario Azzopardi, was removed from his post and instead...