Joe Saliba and former Enemalta chief join Zaren Vassallo in healthcare-IT firm

The former PN secretary-general Joe Saliba has been formally inducted into a company owned by PN donor and construction magnate Nazzareno Vassallo, as the registered director of a new IT-healthcare provider.

Saliba has joined the board of directors at emCare360, a company that is set to become a leader in the provision of electronic and mobile healthcare information services to private and public entities in Malta and overseas.

Another director of emCare360 is David Spiteri Gingell, the former Enemalta chief executive who sat on the adjudication committee of the €200 million Delimara extension for Danish firm BWSC, whose civil works contractor is Vassallo Builders Group.

Spiteri Gingell left Enemalta in June 2008 and was made a senior officer of Datatrak Holdings in August 2008. Datatrak later rebranded itself as Loqus in 2009 with Spiteri Gingell as shareholder,and led the strategic review for the Vassallo Builders Group.

EmCare360 is mainly owned by Caremalta Group, Vassallo’s private elderly care provider, while 25% is owned by 6pm Holdings, of which the Vassallo Builders Group acquired 18.6% in April 2011. 6pm Holdings recently expanded its customer base with the acquisition of Compunet and Softweb Ltd.

Industry observers told this newspaper that emCare360 is positioning itself to become the leader in IT solutions for the healthcare industry. A major area of interest is the provision of the infrastructure to store medical records and files in a database for Malta’s public healthcare reform.

Speculation on Saliba’s future after having won successive general elections for the PN, always centred around his involvement with the construction industry. One of the most priceless media moments of 2007 was the sight of Joe Saliba storming off Zaren Vassallo’s yacht with One TV’s Charlon Gouder in hot pursuit. It cemented the perception of politics’ marriage to big business and Saliba later candidly admitted to what many already knew: that the Nationalist Party accepts donations from people, like Vassallo, who also happen to tender for lucrative government contracts afterwards.

Vassallo Builders Group, which was involved in the construction of the new PN headquarters, was chosen as the civil works contractor for BWSC in 2009 – which would go on to win the controversial €200 million contract for the Delimara power extension. The contract later become subject of an investigation by the Auditor General and the public accounts committee. No allegation of wrongdoing was ever ascertained although irregularities in the public contract process were clearly flagged. Labour is adamant that the Delimara ‘scandal’ reeks of corruption.

Fuelling the conspiracy was the fact that the politically-appointed chairman of Enemalta at the time – Alexander Tranter – was revealed by MaltaToday to be a director of Vassallo’s Caremalta Group. Tranter has always claimed he did not have to resign, as the Auditor General later noted, because he declared his conflict of interest when Vassallo Builders Group was listed as a BWSC contractor.

Additionally, the former Enemalta chief David Spiteri Gingell soon after leaving the corporation later started work with Loqus on Enemalta’s €70 million smart meter project, and subsequently on the strategic review board of Vassallo Builders Group.

Spiteri Gingell, emissions and BWSC

Labour MP Leo Brincat has said Spiteri Gingell was an early proponent of natural gas as chairman of the government’s climate change committee – but then government abandoned plans for natural gas when BWSC was being favoured for the construction of the Delimara plant.

A first draft report in January 2009 on climate change incorporated an estimate of the investment required for the country to go for natural gas within six years. But the committee later removed the obligation of going for natural gas “and paved the way for the use of a plant operated by other sources of energy, including heavy fuel oil.”

Brincat said Spiteri Gingell’s stance changed once BWSC was awarded the contract for its diesel engine, over a combined-cycle gas turbine proposed by Israeli firm Bateman.

“Spiteri Gingell himself had made it clear that natural gas would have to be used by 2012, and infrastructure minister Austin Gatt had spoken in favour of natural gas in 2006 and said that medium-speed diesel did not reach our environmental standards,” Brincat said.

The Labour MP added that on the eve of the 2008 general election, Spiteri Gingell compiled a handover dossier citing 2015 as the deadline for getting natural gas on board.

When in May 2009 the BWSC contract was signed, the climate change committee said that carbon credits could be purchased from the emissions market, instead of investing in natural gas to compensate for emissions. “This had never previously been said in the original January 2009 report,” Brincat said.

Spiteri Gingell has previously claimed that changes to emission rules when he was Enemalta chief had been carried out to comply with EU law. An investigation by the European Commission, which first claimed that the rules were changed to suit diesel technology like BWSC’s, and not gas-powered engines, found nothing irregular in the legal changes.