How to lose a country’s hospitals, blame everyone else, and call it good governance

Let me put the deck on the table: I haven’t read the whole flipping thing; my life probably isn’t long enough.  But that hasn’t stopped the jolly old MLP from lashing out about it, so why should it me?

Once upon a time in the sunny Republic of Malta, the government gave away three functioning hospitals to a private company that promised the moon, delivered a paperclip, and left the taxpayer with an €885 million bill and a moral hangover.

When the courts called the whole deal “collusive,” our Prime Minister, Robert Abela, didn’t flinch. He embraced the collusion. Hugged it. Made it policy.

The logic? If you can’t beat them, join them, and then claim you were right all along.

Once a Maltese appeals court confirmed the February 2023 ruling annulling Steward’s contract on grounds of “collusion,” the government suddenly found religion. The same government that fought tooth and nail to defend the deal for years – issuing statements, legal opinions, and even public apologies on Steward Health Care’s behalf – now held the judgment aloft like a holy text.

Yes, they said, the courts found collusion. And yes, we accept that. In fact, we’re defending ourselves by agreeing with it.  The government stands before the world proudly proclaiming: We were the victims of the very collusion we enabled.

The €885 million question

Between 2016 and 2023, the government paid Steward €884,644,629. Yes, let’s count every euro, because we certainly paid for each one, ostensibly for “healthcare services” while Steward Health Care operated St Luke’s, Karin Grech, and the Gozo General Hospital.

Let’s pause on that. Steward Health Care was paid to run hospitals that were already being operated by the government. Services that were already being provided by Maltese doctors, Maltese nurses, and Maltese taxpayers.

So what exactly did Steward Health Care add, apart from a glossy logo, a few PowerPoints, and a fleet of executives who charged more for coffee than most Maltese pensioners see in a week?

Was there a miracle cure? A new MRI scanner? An improved ward? Anything?

Why was Steward needed at all?

The honest answer is they weren’t. But they were wanted; wanted very much by the handful of people whose have surnames that tend to appear together in Maltese court documents, chat logs, and Panama spreadsheets. Common surnames, common as muck, you might say.

Steward Health Care had promised to invest €200 million of its own money to turn those hospitals into state-of-the-art medical centres – a promise so solemn it might as well have been written on a cocktail napkin.

Eight years later, the investment has all the tangible reality of a ghost. No cranes, no construction, no world-class anything. The only thing built was a labyrinth of corporate structures and offshore payments.

Yet Robert Abela, who inherited this rolling catastrophe from his erstwhile client, wants us to believe that he is the wise adult cleaning up after the naughty children. That his government is now the noble guardian of justice because it has made the court’s ruling that the whole thing was corrupt its own.

Let’s be clear: the government didn’t expose the collusion; the court did. And the court only did so because one man, acting from Opposition, refused to let it die.

Enter Adrian Delia

The same government that now wraps itself in the judgment’s robes spent years sneering at the man who brought the case, Adrian Delia.

They mocked him, dismissed him, and accused him of grandstanding.  When Delia sued to have the hospitals concession annulled, the government of the day treated him like an enemy of progress. He was called a troublemaker, a distraction, a political opportunist.

Now that he’s won, twice, the government has pivoted, smiling for the cameras and saying: “Yes, yes, we agree with the courts. We, too, are victims.”

If asked why they stitched together the original Vitals deal, even Joseph Muscat, Konrad Mizzi, and Keith Schembri wouldn’t be able to put their hands on their heart and say that they did it for the glory of Maltese healthcare.   Not with a straight face anyway.

I’ll leave it to the readers’ imagination to figure out why they did it, and why, when Steward Health Care came along, they played along.  I remember everyone making speeches about “investment,” “innovation,” and “efficiency.”

Meanwhile, not a single hospital bed was improved.  And when the whole “real deal“ collapsed in scandal, Robert Abela found himself standing in the ruins, still clutching the PR script.

So he did what any self-respecting politician would do when surrounded by the smouldering wreckage of his predecessors’ porkies: he claimed the fire was someone else’s fault and started roasting marshmallows on it.

The rule of what?

Abela now speaks reverently about the “rule of law,” as though he discovered it a week last Sunday. He tells us the government must respect court decisions and then, in the same breath, attacks the courts for being misled by Adrian Delia’s lawyers.

Which is it, Prime Minister? If you accept the judgment, then you accept that the contract was collusive, corrupt, and void from the start.  If you don’t, then you’re back to defending the very deal you now claim to despise.

You can’t have it both ways, unless of course you’re playing Maltese politics from the side your side plays, where having it both ways isn’t a contradiction, it’s a tradition.

When the Maltese courts spoke clearly, Abela was dragged to the labyrinth of international arbitration – a secretive, commercial process designed for private disputes, not billion-euro scandals involving public hospitals.

The ICC said the contract was properly rescinded: this, apparently, was supposed to prove there was “no fraud.”  The Maltese courts’ findings of collusion and corruption remain public, binding, and entirely unrefuted.

We, the victims

Let’s not forget the real victims in this opera of arrogance: We, the people of Malta.

We, the people, were promised new hospitals, better care, modern facilities, and a healthcare revolution.  Instead, we got empty wards, peeling paint, and a bill larger than the GDP of some small nations.

Malta’s doctors and nurses kept the system running despite everything, not because of Steward Health Care or Vitals Global Health Care or Abela’s government, but in spite of them.

When the courts finally ruled in favour of the public, it was the government that claimed victory.  The same government that handed away the hospitals now congratulates itself for accepting the courts’ finding that it should never have done so.

Consider Joseph Muscat, Konrad Mizzi, and Keith Schembri – the holy trinity of Maltese “innovation.” Where are they now?

Muscat is giving interviews about how misunderstood he is. Mizzi has wrapped himself in the cloak of invisibility. Schembri, well, he’s busy explaining how all of this is just political persecution.   Plenty of others remained, and remain, silent.

In the echo of this silence, if this deal was so obviously rotten, why didn’t Abela’s government cancel it and hold this bunch to account? Why did they wait for Adrian Delia to drag Steward Health Care through the courts from the Opposition?  Why was it left to one man, with limited resources, to do the job of the entire Maltese State?

And now that he’s done it, why does the government have the nerve to criticise how he did it?   It’s like hiring someone to clean your kitchen, refusing to pay them, then complaining about the way they folded the dishcloths.  Abela’s strategy is simple: turn defeat into performance art.

When you’re accused of collusion, adopt the collusion as your defence. When you’re accused of weakness, claim it’s restraint.

When you’re found to have wasted hundreds of millions, call it “continuity of service”.  And when the courts expose your government’s role in a national scandal, declare yourself the hero for not ignoring the judgment.

It’s politics as pantomime. And like all pantomimes, it ends with the audience shouting, “He’s behind you!”

The (im)moral of the story

In the end, this isn’t about Robert Abela’s legal acrobatics or Steward Health Care’s accounting gymnastics. It’s about trust.

The Maltese people trusted their government to protect their health system. Instead, they got a private company that produced nothing of value and a Prime Minister who seems more concerned with optics than outcomes.

The private company has gone belly-up.  Thankfully, the hospitals are still standing and run by people who work miracles daily, and so here we are, full circle.

The government that colluded to sell the hospitals now colludes to rewrite history.  The Prime Minister, who accepted the collusion finding as a legal defence, now wants applause for his integrity.

And the citizens who paid the price are told to be grateful – grateful that the courts did what the government should have done years ago.

That, in a nutshell, is Robert Abela’s Malta: A place where failure is spun as success, collusion is rebranded as compliance, and the people are expected to say “thank you” for being robbed, politely.