Robert Abela’s fair value

Magistrate Lara Lanfranco has decreed that Vitals and Steward Health Care CEO Armin Ernst will face trial over his role in the fraudulent hospitals concession.

The court was presented with sufficient evidence to charge Ernst with serious crimes.  Yet Prime Minister Robert Abela keeps insisting, “For every cent we paid, we received service back, we received fair value”.

Abela continues to defend Steward, which was spending millions of taxpayers’ euro on a UK-based private intelligence firm, CT Group, to dig up details on “business, political and personal vulnerabilities” of government officials directing proceedings against Steward, which the company could then “target”.

Steward’s principal target was Abela’s rival for the leadership post, Chris Fearne.  That’s the same Fearne who disgraced former prime minister Joseph Muscat excluded from negotiations with both Vitals and Steward.

Instead, Muscat put Konrad Mizzi in charge, even though Fearne was Health Minister and Mizzi was just Minister Without Portfolio. The man at Steward directing the dirt-digging by that UK intelligence firm was Ernst, who was dealing with Muscat’s chief of staff, Keith Schembri, behind Fearne’s back.

Abela has every reason to cover up Steward’s criminal diversion of public funds to destroy his rival, Fearne. Abela wants to bury the filthy and malignant manoeuvring by top Steward officials.  He wants the country to believe that everything at Steward was clean, that the concession was a fair deal.

He’s desperately pushing the narrative that we got a good service for the money we paid, that we got far more than what we paid for.  He dismissed Opposition criticism of that stinking hospitals scam as “the biggest lie ever created”.

“Everything the Nationalist Party has been trying to say from 2023 onwards is a certified lie,” Abela claimed.

The Prime Minister has no option. He’s got to convince the public that the fraudulent Steward deal was just another regular government concession through which taxpayers got everything they paid for. Yet at every corner, more of the despicable scheming keeps surfacing.

With clockwork regularity, Abela’s lies are destroyed by more meticulous investigative reporting, by more incontrovertible evidence to the contrary.

CT group, the UK intelligence firm contracted by Steward, asked Steward what it could “offer” that would be “acceptable” to resolve the dispute.  That dispute arose when Fearne started insisting that Steward be held to its contractual obligations. While Fearne was holding Steward’s feet to the fire, Steward was dealing with Muscat’s chief of staff behind Fearne’s back.

Mizzi was striking a lucrative €100 million side agreement, guaranteeing that, no matter what happened, Steward would make a fortune from the concession. When Muscat was forced out, he accompanied Ernst to Castille to lobby Abela to strike a new “more bankable” deal with Steward.  And Robert Abela obliged.

For months, Abela maintained negotiations with Steward. He even tasked his own father to help reach that deal.  A date had even been agreed for the signing of that new agreement, and the US Ambassador had been invited to the event.

Meanwhile, Steward was diverting taxpayer money to destroy Fearne and other government officials from his ministry, who were considered “opponents” of its concession.  Steward even used taxpayers’ money to pay CT group to collect embarrassing personal information and photographs of a former Steward employee because of concerns he would leak damning financial information to Steward’s auditor.

In July 2022, CT group pledged to “deploy into the public domain information about the main opponent of the client’s concession in Malta” and to “identify improper behaviour” and leak it anonymously to the Maltese public.

Steward’s Armin Ernst was paying CT group as much as US$170,000 per month out of our taxes. In total, Steward diverted over €6.5 million to two private intelligence firms – CT group and Audere – to conduct surveillance and disinformation operations against its critics.

For Abela, those disinformation operations against his own deputy prime minister were fair value for the money Maltese taxpayers paid. You don’t blame him.  Abela has done pretty well from Fearne’s political annihilation.  His only potential rival disappeared, eliminating a potential challenger.

The only “certified lie” is Abela’s. The Maltese taxpayer didn’t get fair value for the hundreds of millions paid to Steward – quite the contrary. Concession ‘investors’ lived the high life while almost nothing was invested in the three public hospitals they were given.

Steward escaped with massive unpaid bills.  Steward was ordered to pay €280,000 to ARMS for unpaid electricity and water bills, administrative expenses, and connection and disconnection fees. It refused to pay €36.5 million in unpaid taxes, interest and penalties. Steward was ordered to pay €841,000 to Zenith Malta Division Ltd for unpaid cleaning services.

Steward failed to pay Signal 8 Security Services Ltd €160,000.  Malta Healthcare Caterers Ltd were still owed €155,000 by Steward.  Support Services Ltd was left with an unpaid bill of € 678,000.  Health Service Group Ltd was cheated out of €64,000, and Orthopaedic Centre Malta Ltd had a pending bill of €181,000.

No, Steward didn’t give Malta fair value for what taxpayers paid, despite what the Prime Minister says.  Steward cheated multiple Maltese companies out of millions of euro by keeping the money paid by the taxpayers for those services for itself.

Steward diverted money meant for propping up the health service for the utterly nefarious purposes of digging up and inventing dirt.

CT group was commissioned by Ernst to make up a “fake” bank transfer record showing that €3.2 million had been moved into an account held by the daughter of Carmen Ciantar, Fearne’s closest aide. Millions more were funnelled out of the country into Swiss companies, which subsequently paid Joseph Muscat tens of thousands of euro.

No wonder the Prime Minister is so desperate to whitewash the entire Steward saga.

As for Fearne, he hasn’t thrown in the towel.  He’s working on his comeback for another electoral victory. Revenge is a dish best served cold.