I’m not comfortable with that headline – the corruption is the issue here, not whether he is Indian

The Opposition should be concentrating on the fact that this was yet another pre-fixed deal – hence, a corrupt one – and that the bidding process was fraudulent. There is nothing wrong with being Indian, and besides being offensive in general, this headline ignores the fact that Malta has had a sizeable and respectable merchant community of Indian origin since the 19th century. It is particularly offensive to them.

And doesn’t the Nationalist Party itself have a councillor who belongs to precisely that Maltese-Indian community?

I reported months even before the call for expressions of interest that Oxley Capital had already struck a deal with the government and that Sri Ram Tumuluri was meeting Maltese suppliers at the offices of PriceWaterhouseCoopers and introducing himself as the person who would be taking over the hospitals.

I had even sent Kurt Farrugia a message way back then, telling him that I knew Oxley Capital had already struck a deal and could he comment. It was the first time ever that he didn’t respect to a message I sent.

The Opposition needs to focus on the corruption here, and it also needs to sniff out where and how John Dalli & Associates are involved, because my twitching antennae tell me that Muscat’s former ‘health czar’ is in there somewhere, which is exactly why he has been so quiet recently.

When he was Health Minister between 2008 and 2010, Dalli was fixated on using a management model from the Indian subcontinent for the state general hospitals, and I believe he had even visited that part of the world to examine some options.

You will also recall – please don’t tell me you’ve forgotten – that one of the first things Prime Minister Muscat did was to anoint Dalli as his health consultant and impose him on Health Minister Godfrey Farrugia. Dalli then promptly moved into an office at Mater Dei Hospital with his daughters Claire Gauci Borda and Louisa Dalli. This went on until the Bahamas scandal broke and gathered momentum. When questioned about it, the prime minister said that John Dalli no longer works for the government, but I found that impossible to believe.