Grab the money and run

The story of the infamous privatisation of the management of three of Malta’s hospitals – the Gozo hospital, and St Luke’s and Karin Grech – keeps bobbing up and down the surface of current affairs.

As more details slowly unfold, it seems more and more that this was a premeditated ‘grab the money and run’ operation by the unknown owners of Vitals Global Healthcare and their chief executive, Ram Tumuluri.

We now know that the chief executive took a €5 million bonus on his third year of the contract’s running; at a point when Vitals had not delivered much of its many obligations. The bonus, it seems, was due to him after three years, irrespective of the success or otherwise of the deal.

Vitals also ‘sold’ – or rather passed on – the deal to Steward Malta after committing the concession to buy medical products and equipment solely from companies owned by Vitals.

The management contract is certainly in trouble. Not so the people behind Vitals and their chief executive.

The concession is practically unworkable. Essentially, Vitals seem to have spent a lot of energy to make themselves rich and left Steward with the wrong end of the stick.

Among other things, the deal was based on unworkable assumptions such as the fantasy economic niche of medical tourism – people coming to Malta to have operations and medical care that cost less than in their own country while ‘holidaying’ in the sun.

Certain projections of the services to be provided in the Gozo hospital, for example, were complete fantasy as the number of cases in Gozo that require particular treatment is so small, that it is obvious that transferring these cases to Mater Dei makes more sense. For the contract to appear sustainable, these projections included a number of cases ‘imported’ from abroad, via a medical tourism ‘niche’ that never took off.

Indeed, such ‘tourism’ could not even begin to be advertised before the hospitals in question were completely refurbished as indicated in the agreements. This refurbishment never took place, even though Vitals had run into a large debt before handing its concession to Steward. It is only now that Steward have prepared a plan for the refurbishment of St Luke’s Hospital that has been left to fall apart ever since Mater Dei Hospital was opened.

One may ask, therefore, what the Robert Abela administration is waiting for to scrap the deal in which Malta’s good money seems to be continually running after bad. The fact that the people from Steward recently used the services of the former Prime Minister, Joseph Muscat, to meet the current Prime Minister did not help the public opinion stakes about the deal, of course.

I am sure that the Deputy Prime Minister, Chris Fearne, has by now become more than aware of the ins and outs of the contract – a contract that many have concluded is unworkable. So much so, that there were reports that Steward has been asking for more money, or alternatively being handed the ownership of the hospitals involved. Robert Abela’s administration is in no position to accept any of these two alternatives.

The leader of the Opposition, Adrian Delia, has sensed that the government is in a quandary and has been pressing for a solution, even offering the Opposition’s helping hand – whatever that might be – to enable the government to revoke the concession.

In the meantime, the Auditor General has been investigating the deal. Many feel that this investigation is taking too much time, with the Auditor General rebutting allegations that it was dragging its feet on the matter. In truth the deal was a complicated one and I do not blame the Auditor General for that.

It could well be that the Prime Minister, Robert Abela is waiting for this report – originally demanded by the Opposition – to take a stand. Basing his decision on an independent report prepared by the Auditor General makes more sense politically, than reacting to reports in the media and the continual baying from the Opposition benches.

Interfering with justice

Consider the following developments:

In December 2018, Prime Minister Viktor Orban of Hungary tightened his grip on power as the Hungarian Parliament, controlled by Orban’s far-right party, approved the creation of a parallel court system that cements executive control over the judiciary.

With the new system, Orban’s justice minister controls the hiring and promotion of its judges, who have jurisdiction over cases relating to “public administration” — including politically sensitive matters like electoral law, corruption and the right to protest.

Last year when the Supreme Court in the UK overruled a government attempt to suspend Parliament during the Brexit negotiations, Boris Johnson called the decision “unusual”. People around him alleged that the court had made “a serious mistake in extending its reach into political matters”. Johnson reacted by appointing a new attorney-general, Suella Braverman, who made clear her enthusiasm for curbing the judiciary’s power.

Last December, after Johnson’s electoral victory, senior legal figures warned him against interfering with the independence of the judiciary, amid mounting concern over the new government’s plans to overhaul Britain’s unwritten constitution.

Three weeks ago, the Financial Times urged the EU to take a tough stance if the Polish government refuses to yield in its efforts to curb the judiciary. It insisted that Brussels must continue to use the European Court to challenge the attempts of the Law and Justice Party (PiS) to cow the judiciary, adding: “Above all, EU states should not shrink from linking future disbursement of lucrative structural funds to upholding the rule of law. States cannot expect to enjoy all the benefits without following the rules.”

The other week, 14 federal judges in the US convened an emergency meeting to discuss concerns about President Donald Trump and the Justice Department’s intervention in politically charged cases.

The judges, a mix of Republican and Democratic appointees, who sit mostly on district courts across the US, met via conference call as members of the Federal Judges Association. The meeting was sparked by Trump’s attack on a federal judge and Attorney General William Barr retracting the prosecutors’ recommended sentence for a Trump ally, Roger Stone. US Attorney General William Barr is reported to have even considered resigning over Trump’s interference with Justice Department matters.

Is interference in the judicial system by politicians in power becoming the order of the day even in countries that profess to be democratic?

And did anyone mention ‘rule of law’?