At least €860,000 in taxpayer money down the drain as Malta Enterprise beneficiary vanishes

The Malta-based branch of a company that claims to provide cutting edge fertility technology, Pera Labs, has disappeared without a trace after benefiting from a highly publicised €800,000 grant from Malta Enterprise, The Shift can reveal.

A site visit carried out by The Shift on Friday confirms that the company does not make active use of the site that it previously leased from INDIS Malta, the government agency responsible for allocating land within Malta’s industrial estates.

Pera Labs Malta is domiciled within Mosta Technopark, a site which it claims to have used as its base to launch “AI-powered sperm analysis devices for fertility clinics,” according to the sole owner and CEO’s LinkedIn page.

In 2022, Burak Özkösem, the Turkish national who is listed as the sole shareholder and CEO of the company, made a big splash in local news outlets, making bold claims about developing cutting-edge biomedical technology.

Today, the site in question has been abandoned, with a notice affixed to the door clearly stating that INDIS Malta is taking legal action to recoup €62,021 in unpaid rent, which has been due since the tenant company stopped paying in April 2023.

In the letter, INDIS Malta warns Pera Labs that its failure to pay rent “constitutes a serious breach” of the lease contract it had signed in November 2021.

Additional breaches of contract identified by INDIS Malta also include the fact that “the property is kept closed and is not being used according to the cited contract, as well as another breach in the number of employees, as defined by the same contract.”

Given that Pera Labs owes the state at least €62,000 in unpaid rent and the evident misuse of an €800,000 Malta Enterprise grant, it remains unclear whether any return ever materialised from the state’s investment.

Özkösem himself appears to have moved on to unspecified work as an “independent consultant,” as his LinkedIn profile suggests he is no longer involved with Pera Labs as of November of last year.

Besides Pera Labs’ debts and the information extracted from Özkösem’s profile, the company’s presence on Malta’s business registry is limited and does not provide information on the company’s finances.

While the company is still listed as active, it has not filed audited accounts for the past four years. Share capital invested in the company is at the bare minimum of just €1,200.

According to a sponsored article published on Malta Business Weekly in 2022, Pera Labs’ Malta operation was supposed to be at “the centre of an international collaboration” that would be directly involved with Pera Labs’ Philadelphia-based partners.

The culmination of the company’s research was supposed to be the development of “AI-powered fertility solutions” to facilitate the selection of sperm samples for artificial fertility treatments.

Yet it seems none of these plans materialised, and a search for any additional information about Pera Labs’ fertility products does not yield much information beyond the company’s own material.

At the time, Malta Enterprise was headed by Kurt Farrugia, who previously served as disgraced former prime minister Joseph Muscat’s chief communications aide. Farrugia currently serves as the CEO of Transport Malta on a contract worth €12,500 a month, a step up from his previous €11,000 a month at Malta Enterprise.

Malta Enterprise’s role in facilitating the transfer of public funds to private operators with dubious track records is well documented.

The state entity responsible for managing the government’s investments in public-private partnerships was ensnared in the hospitals concession case, the Jean Paul Sofia public inquiry, and the financial troubles of an ailing commercial aviation company that also received funding from Malta Enterprise.

Questions have been sent to both Pera Labs and INDIS Malta. No answers were forthcoming by publication time.