Ram Tumuluri: From running a Canadian lakeside hotel into insolvency to running Malta’s public hospitals

What a joke. “I never declared bankruptcy! Somebody came in and saved me at the 11th hour and cleared my debts by taking over the hotel.”

Read the story in The Malta Independent today.

Tumuluri was up to his neck in debts he couldn’t pay. He took over a good lakeside retreat hotel through his management company and in just 18 months he ran it into the ground.

Now he fetches up in Malta, to run our public hospitals and those of – deep breath here – the intensely corrupt Montenegro.

See him hemming and hawing about the real owners of the company registered in the British Virgin Islands. As my regular readers will know, I’m a great believer in Occam’s Razor. It isn’t ‘journalistic instinct’ which alerts me to stories. It’s applying Occam’s Razor, something I’ve always done somehow even before I knew what Occam’s Razor is: Among competing hypotheses, the one with the fewest assumptions should be selected.

Companies – especially those which operate in the public eye – are hugely conscious of their public relations and their image, and because of this, the person who speaks or fronts for them with the public is chosen very, very carefully. He or she is their ‘best-image person’.

If Vitals Global Healthcare’s ‘best-image person’ is Ram Tumuluri, a shady individual whose only known and recorded business track record is running a lakeside hotel in British Columbia into the ground in just 18 months, five years ago, then the obvious conclusion is that the other people in the VGH operation are even worse and have so much to hide that they are prepared to hide it behind somebody so far below par.

The other obvious conclusion to be drawn from Ram Tumuluri’s involvement is that the other people involved in VGH – the hidden ones – could find nobody better than Tumuluri, because people with reputations to protect didn’t want to get involved, or they wanted nobody better so that they could do as they please. Tumuluri isn’t there because he’s an investor. He has people all over British Columbia chasing him for money and he hasn’t got any to invest.

In the company information that is publicly available at the Companies Registry in Malta, Ram Tumuluri and Mark Pawley, a Briton living in Singapore, are listed as the only two directors of the three VGH-related companies registered in Malta. Ram Tumuluri, speaking to The Malta Independent, boasted about Pawley’s fabulous links to the world of finance and investment, and his brilliant track record.

So let’s apply Occam’s Razor here, too. VGH has two directors, one of them with an apparently wonderful track record in the world of finance and investment, and the other with no track record except driving a lakeside hotel in British Columbia into insolvency in just 18 months and leaving under a cloud with people chasing him for money.

So why is it the latter, and not the former, who is appearing for the company in public in Malta, speaking to the press, acting as the public face of VGH, ‘negotiating’ with the corrupt government of Montenegro, and signing contracts with the Malta government? Why isn’t it Mark Pawley, with his infinitely superior track record and reputation, who is doing all this?