The KSU Board of Discipline has addressed the controversy previously addressed by Owen Grech, student representative for Tourism Studies as well as Pulse President, who alleged the Board to have breached the KSU Statute on multiple terms.
The controversy arose following the Board’s decision to restart KE Elections. Grech issued a statement directed towards the Board asking mainly the following questions:
Where in the statute does it state that you are allowed to restart an election?
For what reason were the discussions held during Monday’s meeting ignored?
If the Board was called upon to clarify the issue regarding the 9 proxies why did the board not follow the statute and investigate the case as mentioned on Monday?
Apparently according to the statute the Board is not allowed to restart elections on their own accord. Moreover, after the misunderstanding concerning the proxy votes arose, the Board promised the student representatives that a meeting would be held on Monday 22nd April after the evidence would be retrieved and the situation properly investigated.
This meeting did not take place. Rather than investigating, Education Commissioner Jean Claude Scicluna was abruptly summoned in front of the Board to clarify the situation which the Board claimed to be have been misinterpreted. Following this supposed clarification the Board decided internally to restart the elections.
The KSU Board of Discipline have replied to Grech’s email and have concluded by saying that during the process to evaluation of the proxies, KSU secretary General William Farrugia was asked to view CCTV footage to determine whether the proxies in question were actually submitted on time.
It then clarified that student representatives were to be included in the discussion had the Education Commissioner been under investigation. The Board of Discipline explains that the current Education Commissioner Jean Claude Scicluna was not under investigation and therefore they deemed it fit that indicating a date for the next election was sufficient.
The Board reiterated Grech’s claims that the said board had no right to restart the elections by stating that in fact last Monday’s election had never even started and they state that they are “ensuring that the election takes place and that the right of the members of the Commission to elect their Commissioner is safeguarded.”
With regards to the question of conflict of interest, the board stated that they did not focus on any proxy in particular and therefore did not discuss any issues which directly concerned the members of the board. Rather the board dealt with the general misunderstanding related to how the proxy forms were to be submitted.
The board repeated and affirmed that Scicluna was never under investigation because he was never accused of any allegations.