How do you explain Mark Pawley’s choice of Ram Tumuluri? That’s the bottom line.

Since he left the corporate world and set up Oxley Capital he has operated in the shadows, and this is probably a good strategy in Asia where power and guile are both sides of the same coin.

I have no doubt that he is a high net worth individual as can be deduced from his 24% ownership of the management for Cambridge Industrial Trust – http://www.cambridgeindustrialtrust.com – which was sold in Singapore for $100 million two months ago, after many years of tension between the management and the actual stakeholders in CIT (valued at $1.4 billion), which is listed on the Singapore stock market.

The reason for the tension between management (Oxley,Mitsui and NAB Bank) and the actual stakeholders was because of excessive management fees being charged to the stakeholders, who have now decided to buy out the management and have the properties owned by CIT and managed directly by the stakeholders.

Basically the management shot themselves in the foot by being to greedy with their fees and got booted out. If they take the same approach with the hospitals they will also get booted out well before the 30 year contract is up but it might be very expensive for the government of the day to do this, or they might just sell their management rights onto the next venture fund on the carousel and move onto new pastures.

To me the Vitals deal seems like classic venture capitalist behavior, where the predator (Oxley) eats the prey (the government of Malta) – but this is just the way true capitalism works and is not necessarily crooked or illegal.

The great thing about this deal from Oxley’s perspective is that the government (which cannot declare bankruptcy) is on the hook for 1.8 billion amortised over 30 years, while Vitals Global can just declare insolvency and walk anytime it wants.

And in the meantime it has multiple options to make alpha. First, they can take the annual subsidies and try to actually make money from the hospital business, or as I suspect, once everything is set up, sell their position to the highest bidder. I would say that they already have a shortlist of who they could be.

I don’t suppose her shifty husband is able to hide these articles from her. And, assuming that she does get to see them, what does she think?

Does it suddenly dawn on her that her husband of 20 years is actually a cheap crook or is she just as rotten as he is?

I assume the latter is the norm. One need look no further than the wife of our Prime Minister for the answer. Or the wife of the Minister Without Portfolio who happily took a non-job at 13,000 euros a month.

But I don’t suppose it is always the case. And when it isn’t, it must be pretty tough suddenly discovering that you have been married for years to a complete ****.

Today it is very difficult to do anything without leaving a “digital footprint”. Seems Mr Pawley managed – either he is very good or (more likely) he did absolutely nothing.

Dorian Gray