The PCP assured, this Wednesday, that it complies with the law with regard to the identification of the party’s donors and denied any intervention to prevent the consultation of this information.
In a statement published in the party states that it “proceeds under the terms of the Law on Financing of Political Parties and Electoral Campaigns to identify donors by name when rendering their respective accounts.”
The PCP also says that there is “no basis” for the claim that the party “has intervened at some point to prevent the consultation of donor identification”.
“The PCP not only fully complies with the legislation in force on party accounts but has also advocated for the enshrinement of transparency rules that the very nature of its revenues makes absolutely scrutinizable. A procedure that is carried out with the safeguarding and protection of personal data”, the party further highlights.
Party and campaign donors became secret
This note follows news from TVI released on Tuesday which revealed that, following an opinion from the Commission for Access to Administrative Data (CADA), the Political Accounts and Financing Entity no longer makes the identity of political party donors available.
The news says that the Bloco de Esquerda and the CDU (PCP and PEV) “raised the problem about the identification of donors” and Chega invoked entities external to the party who claim that personal data is protected and that these complaints led to the request for an opinion from CADA.
The Political Accounts and Financing Entity questioned the on the identification of donors, which responded in an opinion dated March 25th and which can be consulted on that institution’s website.
The accounts entity’s questions refer to access by journalists, as well as by “citizens who claim a direct, personal, legitimate and constitutionally protected interest”, namely for “academic, research or public scrutiny purposes”.
CADA maintains that its doctrine “has been constant in the sense that the status of journalist does not confer, in itself, an autonomous title sufficient for access to nominative documents”.
“Documentation that contains the identification of the individual donors (their full name, tax identification or citizen card number, or other element that makes them identifiable), associated with the donation made and the respective value, constitutes a nominative document, as it contains personal data”, they establish.
In this document, it is argued that “the association of a donation with a certain political party or candidacy is, as a rule, likely to reveal, directly or indirectly, the donor’s political opinions or convictions, integrating a special category of particularly sensitive data”.
CADA considers that “the identification of individual donors is necessary for ECFP to verify compliance with the “singular donations regime” provided for in article 7, of Law no. 19/2003, of 20 June, but this functional need does not imply, in itself, disclosure to third parties”.
“Access to the aforementioned documentation can only be provided through the prior purging of personal data that identify or make the donors of financial support identifiable, and, when proportionate and useful, information can be maintained without identifiers, direct or indirect, such as the individual values of donations without identifying the respective holder”, they state.
Regarding access for citizens other than journalists, CADA has a similar understanding, considering that “an interest for scientific research purposes may, depending on the specific objectives and the need demonstrated by the applicant, justify access to documents containing, for example, the individual value of donations without identifying the donor, region of the country/district of residence of the donor, but does not, as a rule, justify access to donor identification”.
