The concrete used in some parts of Mater Dei Hospital is estimated to have cost half what Maltese taxpayers were charged for it, The Sunday Times of Malta has learnt.

Concrete is made up of a mixture of cement, sand, gravel and water. Tests on cores taken from the hospital indicates that less cement than required was used in the formula and in some cases limestone (franka) gravel was used instead of the stronger, and costlier, hard stone (qawwi) type.

It is the latest development in a probe which found weak concrete across Malta’s only general hospital, inaugurated in 2007. The government has requested an urgent meeting with the Swedish contractor after it was established that repair works will cost some €30 million.

The Health Ministry was not in a position to say how many cubic metres of concrete had been poured at Mater Dei Hospital, while the Arup Group, the
UK engineering firm commissioned to study the strength of the hospital’s structure, would not be drawn to say whether the concrete produced would have
cost less.

Read more in The Sunday Times of Malta.