Corruption red flags concerning one of the key players in the Vitals deal should have triggered further scrutiny by the government and lawyers involved, an investigation has found.
A 'Shaukat Ali Chaudhary' was among those charged with a multimillion bribery case in Lahore, Pakistan back in 2002, lawyers working on his bid to take over Maltese state hospitals discovered.
He was subsequently convicted but received a presidential pardon, Pakistani media reports dated 2008 and 2009 showed.
Ali - a Pakistani businessman with Maltese citizenship believed to be the hidden hand behind Vitals - told Times of Malta that he was not the same person named in Pakistani media reports.
"Shaukat Ali is a very common name in Pakistan and Chaudhary is the surname of millions of Pakistanis," he said. "The Shaukat Ali you are referring to was a politician. To my knowledge he passed away some time ago," he said.
Concerns about Ali's potential criminal past, however, were sharp enough for lawyers in late 2014 and early 2015 to classify him as a politically exposed person associated with a bribery scandal in Pakistan.
Those lawyers were preparing paperwork for a bid by the Ali-controlled company Crossrange to take over three Maltese state hospitals.
Ali appeared intent on effectively taking over Malta’s healthcare sector. As lawyers prepared his bid to run the public hospitals, he was also negotiating to buy 49 per cent of Saint James Hospital, the largest privately owned hospital in the country.
The deal with Saint James fell through but Ali’s plans with the Maltese government were safer: he already had a signed memorandum of understanding with the Joseph Muscat government.
But there was a problem. The government couldn’t award the hospitals concession directly. EU rules required it to issue a public call for the concession.
A public call meant due diligence checks and more scrutiny and it is unlikely Ali would have passed EU-required checks, given the due diligence red flags.
After Ali’s name was flagged, Crossrange was removed from all paperwork related to the bid.
Instead, the bidder was listed as Vitals Global Healthcare, a newly incorporated firm that was 100 per cent owned by Bluestone Investments.
Vitals went on to win the 30-year, €4 billion contract to operate Karin Grech, St Luke’s and Gozo General hospitals. The National Audit Office and a civil court both concluded Vitals should have been disqualified from bidding because it had secretly negotiated the deal with the Maltese government before tendering began.
The entire concession was repealed and annulled by a judge in 2023 and is now the subject of a raft of criminal prosecutions against a series of politicians, lawyers and accountants involved in the deal.
Ali: 'Absolutely baseless' allegations
A number of lawyers are among those facing charges. Ali, who is based overseas, is also expected to be charged with crimes.
When contacted, Ali confirmed that he is likely to be charged in court.
He said allegations were “absolutely baseless” and came from “untrustworthy, unreliable and unstable people and sources, whose facts are based on suppositions, lies and fabrications”.
“I feel that we have become the victims of a political football and the subject of vile allegations made by mendacious people,” Ali said.
He told Times of Malta that he was "never owner nor director of VGH or any of its subsidiaries or related companies."
Family ties
While Ali does not appear anywhere on Bluestone’s ownership structure, he had myriad links to the company, investigators probing the hospitals deal found.
His son, Asad, was put in charge of negotiations with the Maltese government.
Ali’s wife sat on Bluestone’s board and various companies linked to Ali received millions of euros from Vitals, either through massive consultancy contracts or by being engaged by the hospitals as suppliers.
One of those companies, Mount Everest FZ, was the very first firm that Bluestone paid as soon as it received its first tranche of money from the Maltese government. Mount Everest FZ was the single largest recipient of funds from Vitals owner Bluestone, investigators have concluded.
And when Vitals looked to hire a financial controller and auditor, it turned to people within Ali’s trusted inner circle: his financial controller, Saba Abbas, and auditor Chris Spiteri.
Spiteri, who is also facing criminal charges, has said he never had any knowledge of wrongdoing and that he has been unfairly targeted for prosecution.
Ram Tumuluri, the public face of Vitals Global Healthcare. Photo: Steve Zammit Lupi€100,000-a-month consultancy
Ali had another, lucrative link to Bluestone in the form of a 2015 deal that would see him net €100,000 a month as a ‘senior consultant’, investigators have concluded.
Ostensibly just a consultant to Vitals owner Bluestone, Ali also got the most expensive company car in the Vitals fleet – a €120,000 Mercedes Benz worth more than the car assigned to its managing director, Ram Tumuluri. His sons and wife were also assigned company cars, despite having no official roles at the company.
Tumuluri was the Canadian-Indian businessman who served as the public face of Vitals Global Healthcare. But investigators think he was effectively just a frontman. Ali, they believe, was the man really calling the shots.
From Gaddafi to Muscat
Ali is alleged to have operated massive, State-owned charities in Muammar Gaddafi’s Libya and one of his sons had business in the country with the daughters of former PN minister – later Labour adviser – John Dalli.
Investigators believe that it was Dalli who introduced Ali to Muscat. Soon, Ali was describing himself as an “unofficial adviser” to Muscat, at the time Malta's prime minister.
Muscat was aware of that, e-mails show, and did nothing to deny it.
He has previously told Times of Malta that Ali was not listed as one of his advisers and that he had “no say about how people describe themselves”.
Dalli stopped short of denying that he introduced the two when asked about that in 2023 by Times of Malta.
Ali told Times of Malta he had "no friendship or any kind of relationship" with Gaddaffi and that "as per my knowledge John Dalli has nothing to do with the VGH project."
Months after Muscat resigned as prime minister in 2020, he started receiving €15,000-a-month payments from another company linked to Ali – the Switzerland-based Accutor Consulting, which was previously called VGH Europe.
Muscat says those payments were for legitimate consultancy work he did for the company. Investigators say he did not provide any evidence to back up that claim, save for an employment contract.
No passport trail
Ali’s ties to Maltese politics stretched beyond the prime minister, however.
He got a residency permit through Malta’s golden visa scheme and eventually even became a citizen. But, while investigators unearthed three separate Maltese passports in his name, state agency Identità has no record of Ali, his permits or passports.
Ali told Times of Malta he only had one valid passport, which he renewed when it ran out of available pages or expired.
The Pakistani magnate is believed to have had a long-standing business relationship with Muscat’s trusted lieutenant, Keith Schembri and was in close contact with Schembri throughout the period under investigation.
Within days of Vitals being awarded the deal to run the Maltese hospitals, Ali was helping Schembri and Mizzi set up secret companies in Dubai, similar to those they created in Panama.
The former OPM chief of staff is also suspected of having interests in other, foreign projects led by yet another Ali-linked company, Spring, including a hospital in Egypt, a bank in Tunisia and a data centre in the Philippines.
Schembri resigned as Muscat’s chief of staff in December 2019. But he continued to take an active interest in Spring’s business affairs; when the COVID-19 pandemic hit the following year, Schembri allegedly worked to secure deals for the company to sell hand sanitiser and virus testing kits.
Muscat, Schembri and Mizzi all stand accused of corruption and bribery in relation to the hospitals deal. They are expected to plead not guilty when they appear in court for their arraignment next week.