On 6 January 2026, the Commissioner for Standards in Public Life wrote to the Prime Minister regarding ministers’ declarations of assets for the year 2024.
This letter followed a request by the Commissioner to obtain copies of the declarations, since the longstanding practice of publishing ministerial asset declarations had ceased. In December 2025 the Cabinet Secretary stated in reply to this request that the Cabinet had decided that there should be a single declaration form for all members of Parliament including ministers, and ministers had declared their assets to the Speaker earlier that year.
The Commissioner understood the Cabinet Secretary’s letter to mean that ministers did not declare their assets for 2024 in the usual manner. They only did so using the declaration form for MPs, which is less detailed. The Commissioner also understood that in future ministers would continue to use this form only, and the ministerial declaration form had been eliminated.
The Commissioner wrote to the Prime Minister on 6 January to express his concern about these developments. He stated that, in effect, ministers would no longer declare their income, and neither would they declare financial investments and bank accounts held by their spouses. Such information was required by the ministerial declaration form, but not the form for MPs. This was a setback for transparency in public life, and it sent a very negative message.
The Commissioner stated that another setback for transparency had taken place because asset declarations by MPs were not published, so declarations by ministers would no longer be accessible to the public. The Commissioner noted that, a year earlier, the Prime Minister had proposed that declarations by MPs should be published within a timeframe to be set by law, but in his letter of December 2025 the Cabinet Secretary made no reference to this proposal.
The Commissioner also noted that ministers were obliged by their code of ethics to make an annual statement of their assets to the Cabinet Secretary on the relevant form. The elimination of this form meant that all ministers were in breach of their ethical obligations, even if no action could be taken against this breach since the Commissioner did not have the power to investigate Cabinet decisions.
In his letter of December 2025, the Cabinet Secretary also announced that the government intended to strengthen the code of ethics for MPs. He stated that this was to be done in the light of recommendations made by the first Standards Commissioner in 2020, as well as a decision by the current Commissioner concerning an MP who had made an untrue statement.
In his letter to the Prime Minister, the Commissioner reacted to this announcement by pointing out that the code of ethics for ministers also needed strengthening. The Commissioner stated that it was particularly important for ministers to be regulated by a solid ethical framework, given their powers and the resources they controlled. He pointed out that the report issued by the first Commissioner in 2020 dealt with both codes, as did also a report issued by the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development in 2023.
The Commissioner noted that both reports also included recommendations to strengthen asset declarations. He stated that these recommendations should be addressed as part of any changes to the ethical framework, even though recent changes to the asset declaration system had been in a contrary direction.
The Commissioner’s letter to the Prime Minister is available from this website in Maltese and English.
