A court has slammed the medical panel that oversees who is given disability benefits for wrongly declaring a patient of Silvio Grixti to be severely disabled.
“The court cannot accept as normal the fact that doctors – qualified medical professionals who are trained to issue medical certificates themselves – were unable to recognise that the statutory conditions were not met and that they accepted unsigned certificates and documents that were clearly lacking essential aspects,” it said.
Grixti, a former Labour MP and popular family doctor, has been implicated in a racket which allegedly involved helping hundreds of people fraudulently receive monthly disability benefits they were not entitled to.
The patient, a woman who was acquitted of fraud charges earlier this week, was taken to court after the police found fraudulent medical documents that included her name on Grixti’s computer.
Despite ruling that the documents describing the woman’s “epilepsy” were fake, the 49-year-old was acquitted as there was not enough evidence to rule that she had knowingly made false statements.
Magistrate Rachel Montebello came to that conclusion on Wednesday because the woman suffers from seizures that are possibly of a psychiatric nature.
The magistrate ruled that the accused could not be expected to have the medical knowledge to distinguish her condition from epilepsy.
Lawyer Alexander Paul Miruzzi was defence council.
In its ruling, the court said Grixti had been the woman’s family doctor for years and he had filled the first part of the 49-year-old’s disability benefits application.
“Everything indicates it was Dr Silvio Grixti who filled out and signed the first part of the application, in which epilepsy was indicated as the condition the accused suffered from.”
In its proceedings, the court heard how the 49-year-old woman from Marsascala was found to be suffering from severe epilepsy on the basis of fraudulent documents.
But, even if the documents were genuine, several things missing from the application presented to the two-person medical panel should have raised concerns, the magistrate said.
The results of an Electroencephalogram (EEG), a test required to diagnose epilepsy, for example, were not signed by a medical professional. The frequency of epilepsy attacks, key information to determine if someone was eligible for benefits, was also missing from the documentation provided to the panel.
Other issues should have raised flags that the documents provided were fraudulent, the court argued. One medical certificate, for example, was attributed to a doctor, Raisa Said, who wasn’t a member of the medical council. The medical register number attributed to Said belonged to another doctor, Valerie Ann Fenech. Said could not be located to testify. Fenech told the court she did not issue or sign any documents attributed to the woman’s disability claim.
Magistrate Montebello also said that the two-doctor panel did not have specialist knowledge in neurological conditions, adding that one doctor, Mark Bugeja, was a surgical trainee, not a neurologist.
The other doctor was not a member of the medical council, the magistrate said. He could not testify in proceedings due to health issues.
Evidence indicates Grixti provided false medical documents to help people, often hailing from Labour strongholds, to receive social benefits averaging €450 monthly for severe disabilities they did not suffer from.
In December 2021, Grixti resigned from parliament after being interrogated by the police over an investigation into irregular medical sick notes.
Following months of investigations, the police filed charges against Grixti and four others in connection with the social benefits racket.