Memory Box: When Muscat sacked Godfrey Farrugia and made Konrad Mizzi health minister instead of him

This was the night that the Prime Minister unexpectedly summoned Godfrey Farrugia, then the Health Minister, to Girgenti Palace and sacked him.

He had also summoned Konrad Mizzi, who was the Energy Minister, and appointed him Health Minister too – Minister for Energy and Health.

I immediately smelled a dirty hospitals deal in the offing, just like the dirty power station deal – one which would have been impossible with Godfrey Farrugia in the way, but for which Konrad Mizzi was essential (along with the Panama company we didn’t yet know about).

And a few months later I got a 100% cast-iron tip-off that the government had struck a deal with somebody called Ram Tumuluri on behalf of a Singapore/Hong Kong company called Oxley Capital. This was months before the official tender/expression of interest was out.

I sent a text message to Kurt Farrugia, the government’s chief of communications, telling him that I’d rumbled them and would he please confirm, and exceptionally, he failed to reply in any shape or form, so I took that as confirmation.

And so it came to pass. The government signed with Ram Tumuluri, a fraudster with a shedload of unpaid debts in Canada, on behalf of the people involved in Oxley – except that we don’t know who else is involved in them because they’re all hidden behind nominees and a company in the British Virgin Islands.

For all we know, their Panama and BVI companies – hard to say which, Keith Schembri has so many – are among the shareholders hidden behind those nominees in the BVI company which now controls so many of Malta’s public hospitals, and they’re paying government money to themselves.