They govern in our name, but conceal vital information from us

The government has said that it will publish “in the coming weeks” its contracts with the people who are to operate our hospitals. The government has said this under extreme duress, faced with challenges in court under the Freedom of Information Act, which it has ignored, and now, because it is faced by demands for publication from the unions which represent hospital workers. And those, it cannot ignore – because imagine the consequences if they go on strike until they see the deal details.

I suppose Chris Fearne, the health minister, will now be buying up the local stationer’s entire stock of thick black markers, so as to black out the crucial bits in those contracts.

But one of the most important pieces of information – the one piece of information we have got to know to see how all the pieces fit together and why Vitalis Healthcare was given the contract to run Malta’s state hospitals – is not in the contract at all. This is the ultimate beneficial ownership of Vitalis Healthcare, which is registered in obscure circumstances in the British Virgin Islands, where shareholding is concealed.

It shocks me, really, that more people haven’t clocked this essential fact: that we don’t know who owns Vitalis Healthcare, that because its shareholding is concealed from the public gaze by registration in the British Virgin Islands, it could be anyone at all, including present government ministers like Konrad Mizzi, who signed the deal as Health Minister at the time, and former European Commissioner John Dalli, who as Health Minister under the Nationalist government was obsessed with striking a deal with some outfit of this nature for the running of the state hospitals but kept it secret. The deal he hoped to work on was, I gather, more of a personal nature than in line with his responsibilities as Health Minister, though that position, of course, came in very handy.

And let’s not forget that when John Dalli was under investigation by the European Commission (though by special arrangement, not by the Police in Malta), incoming Prime Minister Joseph Muscat called a press conference at his office and symbolically seated him at his right hand as his personal consultant on hospital-related matters.

I suspect this is one reason that the government refuses to publish the contracts with the new operators of state hospitals.

And I suspect that this is the other reason. Remember that this picture was taken as Mizzi left Girgenti Palace after a meeting with the Prime Minister, the night Godfrey Farrugia was removed from the position of Health Minister and Konrad Mizzi – who was already Energy Minister – made Health Minister too. They were clearly up to something and had some shady hospital deals in the pipeline to which Godfrey Farrugia would have been an obstacle, but ‘power station Panama’ Mizzi the ideal playmate.