Court tells Frank Portelli to pay back €11.5 million HSBC loan for St Philip’s

A court of law is demanding that hospital group Golden Shepherd, which ran the shuttered St Philip’s Hospital in Santa Venera, pay up the sum of €11.5 million to HSBC Bank Malta.

The order comes a year after a the court declared in February 2015 that the Golden Shepherd Group, which is represented by the former PN candidate to the European Parliament and former MP Frank Portelli, pay up the debt.

Portelli was ordered to pay a €10.6 million loan representing €7.1 million in capital and €3.5 million in interest; and €959,000 which includes €216,000 interest on an overdraft facility.

Since shutting down, Portelli had been seeking a government ‘bailout’ so that the health department rents out beds at the formerly private hospital to solve the state’s own problems of overcrowding at Mater Dei Hospital.

When the deal fell through in 2012, Portelli toyed with the prospect of suing the government for damages a year after the previous administration pulled out of an eight-year lease agreement at the last minute. The deal would have paved the way for the conversion of this private 100-bed hospital, which had closed down after running into financial difficulties, to be converted into a rehabilitation facility.

Dr Portelli was accused by the previous administration of “negotiating in bad faith”, according to news reports.

As recently as January, a court ordered Portelli to pay over €2,000 to a supplier for medicines it had claimed to have been delivered to the private pharmacy belonging to the person in charge of the hospital’s medicine procurement.