The Nationalist Party will back the government if it tries to extricate the country from a hospital privatisation deal that has cost taxpayers millions of euro, Opposition leader Adrian Delia said on Saturday.
“I am offering all the help needed for us to get back that which is ours, to fight those who are robbing us,” Dr Delia said during an interview on Net FM.
He warned that a failure to act would make the Abela government complicit in the shady deal.
“Those who were there when the deal was signed are responsible for that. And those who are there now and do nothing, are complicit,” he said.
Prime Minister Robert Abela has said that he wants a “full stocktake” of the deal to hand over three state hospitals to Vitals Global Healthcare, a mysterious company which sold its concession to Steward Global Healthcare in 2018.
But the Medical Association of Malta is sceptical about the exercise and asked how the government can assess the deal in a few weeks when the National Audit Office has yet to do so, four years after an audit request was first filed.
Steward said last week that it had spent millions trying to unwind a “complicated and shifting structure comprising a multitude of organisations in a multitude of countries” which its predecessor had set up.
Audited accounts for 2016 show that Vitals had liabilities €9 million greater than its assets. Those accounts were only filed with the financial regulator this week.
The boss of the company’s Malta operation, Armin Ernst, previously led Vitals Global Healthcare. Mr Ernst was one of the people to sign off on the 2016 accounts.
On Saturday, Dr Delia said it now appeared that even Steward had not invested the money it had pledged to.
He dismissed sketches of a refurbished St Luke’s Hospital published by Steward Health Care this week as a smokescreen and said Net News had revealed the disastrous state the Gwardamanġa hospital was in.
“Robert Abela doesn’t even know what’s going on. Joseph Muscat and Konrad Mizzi are sitting on his backbench. These guys are drowning in corruption and he’s still defending them,” the PN leader said.