Senior executives at Steward Health Care personally signed off on millions of euros of payments to a Swiss company suspected of funnelling bribes to ex-prime minister Joseph Muscat, leaked emails show.

Internal invoices and e-mails show Steward listed the payments to Swiss payroll company Accutor as being for “political consultants,” “jet expenses”,  “lobbying” and "payroll services". 

Muscat and over two dozen others were arraigned last month on corruption charges related to a multi-billion-euro contract Steward took over from Vitals Global Healthcare in 2018 to renovate and manage public hospitals. They have all pleaded not guilty.

There is no direct evidence that Steward knew the payments to Accutor ended up being used to pay the alleged bribes.

Steward Malta’s president and CEO Armin Ernst personally approved many of the payments to Accutor, which totalled roughly €7.6 million between 2018 and 2020, according to documents obtained by OCCRP and shared with Times of Malta and the Boston Globe.

Steward Malta boss Armin Ernst (right) with Joseph Muscat.

This figure included monthly €80,000 fees that were being paid to Accutor. Internal emails from Steward show the money was intended for Pakistani businessman Shaukat Ali and his son Asad Ali.

A criminal inquiry into the hospitals deal alleged the Alis siphoned off over €10 million in public funds when the concession was run by Vitals.

‘Our political consultants’

In January 2020, Ernst asked Steward executives to catch up on payments to an unspecified recipient ahead of a meeting in Madrid: “I was sent a note by them that they have not been paid since September. Can we get them caught up?” he wrote. 

Asked by the company’s chief financial officer who he was referring to, Ernst wrote, “these are our political consultants. Name is Ali."

That same month, Muscat signed a €15,000 monthly consultancy contract with Accutor. The payment received by the ex-prime minister from Accutor are at the centre of the corruption case brought against him. 

Investigators allege Accutor was used as a hub to launder bribery payments to the ex-prime minister, as well as his chief of staff Keith Schembri and ex-health minister Konrad Mizzi.

About four months later, in May 2020, Ernst asked Steward’s vice president for finance if the company was “current on the Ali consulting payments.”

Steward's vice president for finance did not appear to know who Shaukat Ali was.

The vice president asked for clarification: “Sorry, you’ll have to remind me… who is Ali? Do we have an engagement letter or invoice or something we should be paying from?” 

“It’s a consulting contract with a monthly retainer payable to Swiss company. I think it is around 80k/ month. Could be listed as Accutor?” Ernst replied.

The contract underpinning the payments was signed in November 2017 with STE Health, a Tunisian company which the inquiry said the Alis were behind.

The contract offered a $1 million bonus if Steward obtained the hospital concession in Malta within two months and another $1 million for achieving other milestones.

Armin Ernst explaining the purpose of the payments.

Internal e-mails suggest the Alis played a key role in facilitating Steward’s takeover from Vitals.

In one e-mail dated November 2017, Ernst wrote that he and Steward US boss Ralph De La Torre “shook hands” with Shaukat Ali and his son Asad, whom he described as the “2 major principles (sic).” 

“We assured each other that we are in this together and that we will take care of each other,” wrote Ernst, who had also previously served as Vitals CEO.

“Please remember that without them we would not even be close to having a shot at Malta and quite a few of our prospects are tied to their relationships and effort.” 

In August 2020, Steward ended its contracts with Accutor, without elaborating on the reasons. Emails and transaction records show Steward then began making payments to another Swiss company, Canberra International, controlled by Asad Ali.

According to internal financial reports Steward paid Canberra around €450,000 between 2021 and 2022 for what was listed as business development.

An excerpt from the consultancy agreement between Steward and STE Health.

Asad Ali has been charged with bribing Muscat and other government officials. 

Shaukat Ali is expected to face similar charges. Both men deny wrongdoing.

Payments to Muscat

Muscat signed a €15,000 monthly consultancy contract with Spring X Media AG, which was owned by the same man as Accutor. 

Banks stopped the payments from SpringX and Accutor in June 2020, after it found them to be suspicious, according to testimony in the inquiry.

By that time, the former prime minister had received €60,000 from the Swiss company.

Times of Malta uncovered the payments in November 2021.

The leaked Steward emails show that the same month Muscat’s payments were "blocked", Steward sent Accutor €400,000 from its Bank of America account, which was described in an email chain as an “Ali wire” to cover five months of consultancy payments. 

Asad Ali has been charged with bribing Joseph Muscat. Photo: Matthew Mirabelli.

Muscat has previously stated that the payments he received from Accutor were for legitimate consultancy work unrelated to the hospital contract.

He declined to comment for this story, citing a court gag order. “I deny the veracity of the claims you quote, and this will be demonstrated in court in due course during the proceedings,” he said in an email. 

According to the criminal inquiry, Steward had used Accutor to set up a “political support fund” and “used monies diverted from the concession to fund payments to, or on behalf of” Muscat, Schembri, and Mizzi.

Like Muscat, both Schembri and Mizzi are alleged to have financially benefitted from the funds paid to Accutor. 

Schembri is suspected to have indirectly benefitted from the funds by forming a business relationship with Spring Healthcare, another Swiss company affiliated with Shaukat Ali and Accutor.

Mizzi in turn is alleged to have been involved in a consultancy agreement linked to Accutor. 

“The probability of all three politicians forming independent relationships with the same foreign group of companies over the same timeframe without there being a common association, is considered so negligible that we exclude the possibility,” the inquiry said. 

A table in another internal Steward document listed seven payments of €125,000 each, made in 2019 and 2020, and an invoice for Accutor consulting from Spring Healthcare, for the same amount in December 2019. 

Keith Schembri (right) and Konrad Mizzi are also alleged to have benefitted from the money Steward sent to Accutor.

Those payments appear to overlap with the dates and amounts of eight payments that the criminal inquiry said went to the “political support fund” for the ex-government officials. 

The inquiry said the payments to Accutor “were also funded directly from money paid to Steward by [the Government of Malta] for the operations of the Maltese hospitals and overlap with the payments to Joseph Muscat".

Four other payments Steward made to Accutor in 2019 amounting to $618,000  were listed as “jet expenses” in a ledger submitted to Steward’s auditor EY. 

A spokesperson for Steward International told Times of Malta that the company "entered Malta in good faith and has been consistently transparent and focused on providing maximum value to patients and taxpayers."

"We categorically deny any accusations of wrongdoing and will vigorously defend ourselves. During the course of the four-year inquiry in Malta, we have never been asked to provide any information in any form.

"A simple request during that period should have been considered and would have allowed for an objective and reliable investigation.  We look forward to setting the record straight," the spokesperson said. 

'This isn't going away'

In a March 2022 e-mail, Ernst asked for a complete list of all payments that went to Accutor since Steward took over the hospitals concession. 

He said he wanted a list of the payments “so we can properly assign them”.

“I have to assume that at some point we will have to account for them in detail,” Ernst wrote. 

In another e-mail a month later, Ernst referenced a Times of Malta article about certain payments to Accutor.

He said in the e-mail that “it seems like the below issue is not going away anytime soon”.

The email outlined the reasons that Accutor was engaged, which included the company acting in an escrow-like role for the concession payment to Vitals, being a recipient for Ali’s monthly retention payments, performing payroll services, and acting “in a lobbying capacity.”

The various justifications for the Accutor payments given by Ernst in an internal e-mail.

Ernst linked this “lobbying” to Steward's attempts in 2019 to re-negotiate the hospitals contract with the government. 

“We then managed to move this [the negotiations] along and it made it to the cabinet agenda for sign-off, just to be derailed by the minister resignation due to the GOV crisis. We then obviously terminated that agreement - but they seemed to have been effective,” Ernst said of Accutor.

Mizzi resigned as a minister in November 2019, after the government was thrown into crisis after the arrest of businessman Yorgen Fenech for allegedly mastermining journalist Daphne Caruana Galizia's assassination. 

Ernst further claimed in the e-mail that Accutor was “managing other projects within GOV at that time.”

Accutor owner Wasay Bhatti was included in correspondence about the ongoing negotiations.

Contacted by Times of Malta, Bhatti said: "As you are aware, I may be the subject of proceedings in the near future. In light of this, I prefer not to comment on your queries. Any statements I deem fit will be made by me in court". 

This article was produced with support from OCCRP and the Daphne Caruana Galizia Foundation.