Chasing Steward

Steward Health Care has been ordered to pay €850,000 to a Maltese company that provided cleaning services at Karin Grech and Gozo General Hospital, after the company ignored repeated reminders to pay for the services. With its limited resources, that cleaning company achieved far more than the government did.

When Steward was dragged to court, they tried to cheat the Maltese company out of that money, claiming the contract had expired and had never been formally renewed. But the court was having none of Steward’s nonsense.

Judge Mark Simiana noted that Steward remained bound by the agreement if it continued to accept those services. The court condemned Steward to pay €841,508.52, plus interest and all legal fees related to the case.

The problem for that cleaning company is that Steward filed for bankruptcy in the US in May 2024 with US$9 billion in debt. It left communities served by its hospitals in utter chaos.

Some of those hospitals were sold off, and others closed down. Over 1,000 workers were left jobless.

Medical staff testified that Steward’s disastrous management harmed patients. Records reviewed by CBS News showed that Steward left a trail of unpaid bills, at times creating shortages of life-saving supplies.

In one particularly tragic case in Massachusetts, a company repossessed equipment needed to stop bleeding from the liver of a woman who’d just given birth to her first child after Steward failed to pay the company. The young woman had to be transferred to another hospital, but died just hours after giving birth.

Now, in a remarkable turn of events, Steward has filed new court papers blaming the company’s financial disaster on its own chief executive – Ralph de la Torre – the man disgraced former prime minister Joseph Muscat hosted at Castille. At that meeting, Muscat told de la Torre, “I am confident that your involvement in the project and country will yield exceptional results”.

The press was only invited for the first five minutes of that meeting. The rest continued behind closed doors.

According to a complaint to Congress, de la Torre bragged he could sway Malta’s government officials with “brown bags of cash”.

Now, Steward is accusing de la Torre that “through his greed and bad faith misconduct, (he) operated Steward with the aim of enriching himself at the expense of the company, its creditors and the patients and communities that Steward served”.

Their court filings claim that de la Torre and his close associates “pilfered Steward’s assets for their own material gain, while leaving the company and its hospitals perpetually undercapitalised and insolvent”.

A CBS News investigation revealed that de la Torre sold off hospital premises and then forced his own hospitals into costly lease-back arrangements, making millions for himself while patients struggled to get life-saving supplies.

The court filings against de la Torre list three major transactions in which he profited. In January 2021, de la Torre allegedly took a US$111 million dollar dividend payout.

He also pocketed another US$81.5 million. Steward International, the company responsible for Steward’s Maltese hospitals and which is majority owned by de la Torre received US$4.3 million dollars.

Meanwhile, de la Torre spent US$30 million on a luxury yacht, bought a multi-million-dollar ranch in Texas in 2022 and two corporate jets valued at US$95 million.

Steward left that Maltese cleaning company short of €850,000. Steward didn’t just fail to pay that company – it played with people’s lives. For hospitals, cleaning is literally vital. Without proper cleaning, vulnerable patients risk acquiring potentially life-threatening infections.

But Steward did far worse. It left our hospitals without the required investment, and today we’re paying the price of the severe shortage of beds and facilities, putting the whole health service under immense strain.

Even Steward itself is admitting that de La Torre and his closest colleagues pilfered the company, jeopardising patients’ lives through their greed and misconduct, leaving a trail of unpaid bills and unfulfilled responsibilities. His own former company is insisting that de la Torre and his allies allegedly “sold valuable assets and diverted proceeds to themselves”.

Everybody can see the disaster Steward’s top officials have caused – except Malta’s Labour government. Robert Abela celebrated the International Chamber of Commerce’s decision as a great victory.

His party proclaimed that Steward fulfilled all its obligations to the country, insisting that Steward had given the country what it was paid for.

Even the US government has filed a civil complaint under the False Claims Act against Steward, alleging serious violations. Federal probes are ongoing into fraud, corruption, and bribery allegations, and federal agents have seized electronic equipment belonging to Ralph de la Torre and Armin Ernst.

Steward has declared that its top officials, particularly de la Torre, enriched themselves at the expense of creditors, patients, and the very communities that Steward was meant to serve. Malta and Gozo suffered the same fate because our own government officials colluded with Steward to engineer Malta’s biggest fraud.

Steward has now received a bankruptcy judge’s approval of a liquidation plan that aims to repay some of the company’s creditors with proceeds from lawsuits against de la Torre and other insiders.  That same judge also authorised Steward to use employee retirement funds to pay its creditors.

Everybody is chasing Steward for the US$9 billion it owes and for unfulfilled contractual obligations – except our government. Labour let Ram Tumuluri slip out of the country, leaving our Court authorities unable to serve him a summons and charges because nobody really knows where he’s gone.

Labour let Armin Ernst leave the island without seizing any of his electronic equipment and without the slightest effort by our police to investigate him. Maltese companies are still owed hundreds of thousands of euro.

Steward used millions of taxpayers’ money to smear former health minister Chris Fearne. Millions more were siphoned into Swiss accounts from which Joseph Muscat was paid tens of thousands.

Of course Labour won’t chase Steward. Labour isn’t going to defend and protect Maltese companies and Maltese citizens. Labour made no real effort to obtain justice for its citizens or to recoup the millions Steward funnelled out of the country.

Labour is too intricately and deeply intertwined in that sordid deal. It has got too much to hide.