Our View: Nothing transparent about election campaign expenses

All the presidential candidates met the deadline for the submission of the accounts of their election campaigns to the elections registrar. The exercise is supposedly meant to serve transparency, but it does nothing of the sort. The primary objective of the law on election campaign finances is to create the impression there is regulation and transparency, but there has never been either, because the political establishment does not want it.

Candidates can declare any amount they want as their total revenue and expenditure and there is no way to check that the figures are in any way accurate. In the last presidential campaign, for instance, Nikos Christodoulides declared spending of €1,019,356, Andreas Mavroyiannis €1,208,152 and Averof Neophytou €975,522. Neophytou did not make the run-off so would have spent less, but are these a true reflection of their respective expenditure?

Mavroyiannis may have declared the highest spend, but Neophytou and Christodoulides started campaigning much earlier than him and had a much bigger exposure on billboards, television and websites during the campaign. The general impression was that they had spent much more than the Akel candidate on advertising, but nobody can say with any certainty that they had. Perhaps their respective campaign managers negotiated much lower rates with the media they used. As none of them would have made under the table payments, perhaps they omitted to declare part of the spending.

The audit office tries to check amounts spent on advertising. It asks all media to submit the amounts invoiced to each candidate for election advertising and, presumably, tries to establish whether the amounts add up to the totals declared. There is no way of knowing, however, if the amounts submitted are accurate and the audit office can only work with the figures it is given – it will not carry out investigations to establish if the figures are correct.

The campaign, for the purposes of the law, starts six months before the election and this is the period for which candidates are obliged to submit accounts, even though campaigning began much earlier. For example, President Christodoulides, as was revealed, received €200,000 from Columbia Ship Management before the official start of the campaign so was this amount not included in his campaign’s revenue from legal entities? Christodoulides did not give the name of his donors, in contrast to Neophytou who listed all companies that made contributions by name and registration number, but he had no legal obligation to do so.

The right not to give the names of companies contributing to an election campaign makes the whole exercise a charade. It negates the very idea of transparency, which the law on campaign finances is meant to ensure. Even on the actual finances, candidates are free to submit any figures they choose (as politicians do with their capital statement) as there are no provisions for the checking of their accuracy. If anything, the law, as it stands, is so superficial it legitimises a lack of transparency and the cover-up of suspicious transactions.