Five years ago, on signing the deal with Steward Health Care, then minister Konrad Mizzi tweeted: “We look forward to shaping a best in class patient centric model for health public private partnerships.”
Joseph Muscat, then prime minister, said: “Our resolve to upgrade Malta and Gozo’s healthcare services to world-class levels has been given a further boost through this partnership.”
Today, a glorious investment in one staff toilet later, plus several hundred million euros flushed away, a court judge has torn away the shroud covering the true portrait of Dorian Gray, as we must call the Maltese state.
It’s a state so decomposed and corrupt that it can only be called a zombie: bug-eyed, slug-lipped, pox-breathing, roach-brained and maggot-hearted, in rags all mossy and green from the spittle of its lies.
Despite the thousands of words already written about the damning court judgment, the enormity of what was perpetrated hasn’t yet sunk in. There’s too much to absorb and remember.
It’s not just the scale of the heist, whose ultimate aim was to nab billions. It’s that the perpetrators didn’t even bother with the flimsiest of cover-ups.
The frontman of the anonymous consortium, Vitalis (later, Vitals) was a conman whose record could easily be googled. Daphne Caruana Galizia did. But for the government it clearly didn’t matter.
Anyone who came in contact with the project realised it was a scam. The late cardiologist, Albert Fenech, initially believed in it. By the time he left in disgust, the facility he set up in Gozo was down to the last week of supplies in the laboratory.
The scammers weren’t worried about being caught. Just last year, Steward’s own president in Malta, Nadine Delicata, wrote an op-ed in which she claimed the authorities were grossly negligent in monitoring what Vitals were doing or, rather, not doing: keeping no management accounts while siphoning off money, leaving none for staff salaries.
What else can explain such behaviour, if not the conviction that nothing would be done about it? What else can explain such a sense of impunity, unless it were an inside job?
Still, the Labour government steamed ahead, its cabinet unbothered by revelations of secret agreements, shady ownership and total lack of experience in health or medical tourism.
This isn’t just a story of crooks and greed. It’s a story of heartlessness. Three hospitals were left in limbo, even as the population grew exponentially, bringing under great pressure the services of a general hospital built with far fewer patients in mind.
The country wasn’t just robbed of money and time. Ordinary people were robbed of their dignity when, as patients, they were forced into crowded wards and corridors, even as the government boasted of “the real deal” and improved services.
Everyone was lied to but none more so than Labour supporters who trust ONE news, whose bulletins boasted repeatedly of the greatness of the health service that the government was planning for them, even as the scammers robbed the viewers.
When honest decent politicians screw up, they apologise – and, if they occupy a public post, they resign to show they mean it. We have yet to hear a single apology from anyone on the Labour benches, past or present. No admission of wrongdoing – not even of carelessness – let alone contrition.
Instead, in parliament on Monday, the government benches became the Savile Row of bespoke bullshit, tailored for the occasion.
It’s a state so decomposed and corrupt that it can only be called a zombie: bug-eyed, slug-lipped, pox-breathing, roach-brained and maggot-hearted, in rags all mossy and green from the spittle of its lies- Ranier Fsadni
Chris Fearne told us the government had been prudent, standing back to hear what the courts would say. You’d think Adrian Delia had won his case against Steward Health Care only.
But, as the first page of the court judgment will tell you, his opponents in the case included Muscat, as prime minister, the attorney general and three other Maltese state authorities.
The court judgment is an indictment of another systemic state failure – on a scale which approaches that of Daphne Caruana Galizia’s assassination.
All this is apart from the fact that three cabinet ministers – Edward Scicluna, Chris Cardona and Konrad Mizzi – had fought tooth and nail to prevent a magisterial inquiry from being opened into the deal. They did not just resist. They smeared the journalist, Caroline Muscat, on whose reports Repubblika’s request for an inquiry was based.
And, as they do now, they turned a principle of good governance upside down, invoking cabinet responsibility to evade personal responsibility, when it really means that all ministers own cabinet decisions.
Robert Abela and Fearne tell us that all this has nothing to do with them. It has everything to do with them.
The government they lead continued to approve funds for Steward and even increased them, when they surely knew what kind of rot there was.
They can’t take their distance from the culprits – not when they have defended and rewarded them.
Scicluna now runs the central bank with a topped-up salary. Mizzi was protected by Labour MPs on the parliamentary public accounts committee when called in for questioning on another deal, Electrogas, which the US government has called out for being mired in significant corruption.
As for Muscat, he has had an unprecedented golden handshake, which includes benefits for his wife and an office he occupies at the government’s pleasure. How can Muscat be implicitly blamed without his cosy arrangements sending out a message of impunity?
Abela insists he will take decisions in Malta’s interests. That would be marvellous. Right now, the only marvel is the sight of spineless ministers pretending they can walk tall.