Ministers found using public resources for personal Facebook pages

Four ministers have been found to have misused public resources for material uploaded directly to their private Facebook pages.

The Standards Commissioner found that Infrastructure Minister Ian Borg, Environment Minister Aaron Farrugia, Economy Minister Silvio Schembri and Finance Minister Edward Scicluna all incorrectly used public resources.

They were told by the Standards Commissioner that they should instead share publicly-funded material from their official government Facebook accounts to their own pages.

In a report issued on Thursday, the Commissioner, George Hyzler, says an investigation found that of five ministers investigated, the four constituted bad practice through the wrong use of public resources.

Education Minister Owen Bonnici was not found to have misused public resources. 

The Commissioner said the random sampling of five ministers' posts led him to observe that while good practices exist, bad practices and misuses of resources is widespread.

"In my opinion, a number of ministers and parliamentary secretaries have,to date, failed to properly distinguish between the official and personalspheres in the use of their personal social media channels", Hyzler said...