Joseph Muscat knows that the concrete was supplied by John Dalli’s drug-trafficking/Camorra brother

He must do, because back in the early stages of the hospital’s construction, when Alfred Sant was leader of the Opposition and Joseph Muscat was tacked onto his coat-tails to the point where he ended up courting Sant’s personal assistant Michelle Tanti to get his foot even further in the door, Sant and the Labour Party kicked up the biggest stink about those concrete supplies.

The mistake Sant made, because of his ‘hbieb tal-hbieb’ fixation – though in this case he was 100% right – was to focus only on who was supplying the concrete when the bigger issue – because of the nature of the person supplying it – was the quality.

That person was Bastjan Dalli – a criminal, drug-trafficker and Malta contact for the Naples Camorra – whose equally dreadful brother John is the disgraced former cabinet minister, European Commissioner and latterly, consultant to prime minister Joseph Muscat.

I can’t remember what year it was, but what I do remember is that John Dalli was finance minister and the hospital was being built when Opposition leader Sant said that Mixer Ltd, a concrete-supply company, was supplying concrete for the construction.

Mixer Ltd is owned by Bastjan Dalli, but when it was incorporated, John Dalli’s daughters Louisa and Claire, who front all his companies and operations now, were too young to do so then.

The point has to be made that Mixer Ltd was not the official supplier. In true John Dalli style, it got in through the back door, under cover of something or somebody else, so that the news was even a surprise to the government, who had contracted the Swedish corporation Skanska and Maltese construction companies Blokrete and Devlands.

Alfred Sant said at the time that Mixer Ltd was supplying concrete to Blokrete and Devlands and that it was taken on site using vehicles owned by those companies so that Mixer Ltd wouldn’t appear anywhere.

Sant had called a press conference during which he showed journalists a video in which a truck marked with the Devlands name was covertly recorded loading up with concrete at Mixer Ltd and then driving onto the hospital site.

Bastjan Dalli had denied the obvious at the time, but he’s a drug-trafficker and Camorra contact (and John Dalli’s brother) so nobody believes him.

It looks like the hospital concrete was yet another secretive Dalli scam for which other people now have to pay the price while one or more Dalli brothers ran off with the money.

Mixer Ltd does supply poor quality concrete. Bastjan Dalli was named in conversation by members of the Naples Camorra, in a telephone conversation recorded by the Italian police as part of a magisterial investigation there, as one Camorra family’s fixer in Malta. Poor quality concrete for public projects in Italy and Sicily is one of the fields in which the Mafia and the Camorra excel.

In 2002, the Housing Authority called off a contract worth 2.5 million euros with Mixer Ltd, for the construction of social housing, after professionals were called in to examine the concrete and they found it to be below par and unsafe for building.