Liberal Millionaires Club

Peter Rukavina has the blues this week after Premier Robert Ghiz shut down his bot-crawlers on the corporations site. At least they could have given Ruk a contract to fix the government website which is only 10 years behind the rest of the world. Ruk’s innovative display of techno-skills got him cut off at the bot.

Paul MacNeill, of the two Graphics, takes umbrage and notes Attorney General Gerard Greenan would not be interviewed. Greenan knows when he’s out manned and wouldn’t show for anything but a photo op with a Grade II student.

Is it just me or does anyone else think Greenan looks like a mafioso in his black shirt shtick at Legislature? Or else he is suffering under some color blindness disability and we’re not allowed to comment. Is that bad taste or what?

Some days the whole Leg row has on the “black shirts”. Are the Liberals a rock band or a band of thieves. I digress. Sometimes in the silliness of it all, we forget they have absconded with $400 million.

BREAKING NEWS: Ghiz government moves to limit access to business data

December 8th, 2008

Eastern Graphic

The Ghiz government has moved to effectively shut down an Internet website that allowed Islanders easy access to public information on Island companies, including the owners and shareholders.

Late last month Peter Rukavina, owner of Reinvented Inc, launched www.opencorporations.org.The site used specialized software to pull together information already available in various government databases including the provincial business registry and Royal Gazette.

It immediately became hugely popular, Mr Rukivina reported on his website in announcing the imminent December 10th closure of opencorporations.

“Over the week that opencorporations has been live there have been over 150,000 searches from 2,100 unique visitors, the vast majority of them from Prince Edward Island. On average each visitor visited 46 pages,and spent 10 minutes on the site.

Of somewhat ironic interest, some of the most frequent users of opencorporations.org were within the Government of PEI network (3,927searches), the Island Regulatory and Appeals Commission (2,016 searches) and Atlantic Canada Opportunities Agency (1,057 searches).”

The obvious connection between the site and its immediate popularity is the highly controversial Provincial Nominee Program. For the first time Islanders were able to see the corporate holdings of Islanders displayed in a single database.

Users were able to search by individual name – for instance Richard Brown. Search results would include all companies, including numbered companies, associated with the name searched.

By comparison to conduct a search on the provincial government website, the name or registration number of a corporation must be used and results do not cross-reference with other available government databases.

The government site severely limits public disclosure of already public information.

The use of ‘spider’ technology is not illegal. Nor does it harm government’s computer system. It merely pulls already public information from various government sources into a single accessible database. To minimize any potential strain on government servers Mr Rukavina directed his software toward government computers in the middle of the night when they are least used.

In response to opencorporations, the Ghiz government – which claims to be open and transparent – now demands that individuals conducting must type in a key code for every search. The end result is the spider software is rendered ineffective.

The minister responsible for the provincial business registry,Attorney General Gerard Greenan, did not return a request for an interview.