Saviour doesn't want anyone to probe him. Remember this?
This isn't from Saviour Facebook profile. It's from Southpark.
The Sunday Times 12th July 2009
Saviour Balzan calls for probe after €88k public fund handout exposed
Saviour Balzan, presenter of the TV programme Reporter and editor of Malta Today, has demanded that PBS launches an inquiry after The Sunday Times revealed that his 10-minute daily programme received over €88,000 in one year from the government’s Public Service Obligation (PSO) fund.
In a letter to PBS chairman Clare Thake Vassallo, Mr Balzan’s lawyer, Toni Abela, said his client was “surprised” when he saw The Sunday Times report of June 28 and “cannot understand” how “confidential information” found its way into the newspaper.
Reporter, aired on PBS five days a week and produced by Mediatoday, which is co-owned by Mr Balzan, received 68 per cent of PBS’s €130,000 PSO allocation for current affairs and discussion programmes from October 2007 to September 2008.
In a reply to a parliamentary question on July 3, Culture Minister Dolores Cristina – whose ministry decides which programmes should qualify for the contribution following a list submitted by PBS – revealed that Mr Balzan’s programme received a further €88,540 from the PSO in 2008/2009.
The PSO fund, which totals €1.1 million, is provided by the government to ensure that programmes with a cultural, educational or social orientation are broadcast even though they do not necessarily justify their cost through advertising revenue.
Mediatoday has applied to air Reporter on next season’s PBS television schedule. According to sources, the programmes for a given week are filmed together in one session and weekly production costs, described as “low level and studio-based”, do not exceed €800.
Dr Abela also wrote in the letter: “Apart from breaching the Data Protection Act, which PBS normally cites whenever it is asked about payment to contractors and private production houses, the answer has always been that this information is of a commercial nature and should never be divulged. The contrary happened in this case.”
The letter, which was copied to the Culture Ministry and the Data Protection Commissioner, said the way things had evolved did no good to PBS or the national station’s clients.
However, when contacted yesterday, chairman Ms Thake Vassallo said that the information revealed by The Sunday Times was in the public interest and there was no breach of data protection.
Ms Thake Vassallo said: “It’s not confidential information. The public should know where public funds go, it’s no secret. We always show what we spend on each genre… it’s been put on the table in Parliament a number of times.
When asked if there would be an investigation, she said: “The spend of public funds is public information, it’s not confidential, so it’s not a big issue.”
Mediatoday’s newspaper Malta Today, edited by Mr Balzan, was itself behind a story in November 2005 which quoted a confidential report to show the cost of Where’s Everybody’s flagship programmes – which are aired on PBS.
When Where’s Everybody’s directors wrote a letter to explain their side of the story, it was accompanied by an editor’s note which read: “Malta Today’s report is in the public interest and in accordance with true investigative journalism on everything… The origin of these funds are (sic) from taxpayers’ money.”
Other programmes which received significant sums from the PSO for the 2008/2009 season include Bijografiji produced by Where’s Everybody, which got €91,234; Tini5 produced by Dee Media, which got €83,615; and D produced by Claire Agius, which got €81,524.
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Pots, kettles and dark colours spring to mind.
Daphne this is all money down the drain when Malta is facing big financial problems. Besides Government is just arming its enemies. No wonder that its ratings are so poor.
Iva, daqsekk jiehu Balzan hejj? Imisshom jisthu, flus mormijja, dak anqas karlin ma jiswa. Ghandu ghalfejn jghid ghal haddiehor ukoll.
Balzan’s lawyer is Toni Abela.
Should this be confidential as well?
No further comment is necessary.
I can hardly wait until the news rules on Directive 95/46/EC are discussed by the Commission and implemented. The way it.s been interpreted, particularly in Malta, to create a right to privacy where it not ought exist, is phenomenal if not to say outright disgusting.
And here’s a bit of irony for you. In the UK, common law holds that citizens do not have a right to privacy. This might seem as a contradiction to the basic fundamental freedom of the right to private family life etc., But it isn’t. Hard as it may seem to understand (time and space do not permit, and besides I wouldn’t want to bore your readers to tears) it actually is consonant with it.
Fact is though, that in a country where citizens protest to the state against the introduction of identity cards, claiming that this breaches their privacy, in a state where the jus comune dictates no blanket right to privacy, the Data Protection Directive is implemented in the most limited manner.
There is no hogwash about a breach of one’s privacy if a newspaper decides to grace its pages with, say, a photo of yours truly if it was taken in a public place. No truck is held with idiotic parents refusing the taking of photographs during a school play.
No circumventing of laws intended to preserve the public interest in favour of the Data Protection Directive, as those now prohibiting individuals from discovering who’s who in the company register, the electoral register, reverse directories and many more instances such as these making it impossible to file cases properly, enforce judgements and generally allow scum to get away with all sorts of commercial shenanigans.
Bereft of the capacity to legitimately obtain information in order to sue (and be sued) as may be one’s wont and right has created a climate of frustration for those seeking justice through the courts. Naturally, seeking justice on an administrative level, something this that has always been something of a nightmare here, is now virtually impossible.
And all this is due to the twerps who inhabited the corridors of the Data Protection Commissioner’s offices – and some of the Commissioners themselves, when this whole thing started. But this is what happens when you have people who are completely untrained not just in this particular area of the law, but for the most part, untrained generally.
Daphne,
All in all then it is a question of ‘ Min ma jilhaqx l-gheneb jghid li hu qares’
Do you agree with this?