Nadine Delicata, president of Steward Health Care Malta uses this morning’s Times of Malta to indict the government about the state of the three formerly publicly hospitals they run. But first she lashes out at “everyone on the island” because of what she suggests are baseless opinions “trotted out for political point-scoring” forgetting Steward’s hard-working staff taking care of their patients.

This is using medical professionals (and patients) as human shields. Before the hospitals were privatised, we had conscientious medical professionals. It surprises no one that they haven’t lost their conscience since. The issue here is not the conscience of nurses, or cleaners, or doctors. The issue here is the conscience of criminals.

There are some surprises in Nadine Delicata’s article dropped casually mid-sentence, but I expect, intentionally put out there. Steward appear to have decided to stop covering up for the government’s lies.

Consider her claim that “the difficulties were evident from the start. Steward was approached by the Maltese government to take over the concession, which, at the time in 2018, was in a state of dire emergency.”

Come again? Did you say the government approached Steward to buy VGH’s shares?

Now remember. Given VGH’s failures the government had the right, some would say the duty, to take the concession back from VGH and, if they wanted to stick to the privatisation model, offer it for sale again to the highest qualified bidder. That’s how value for money would have been secured.

It was bad enough that the government allowed, as they claimed they did, VGH to flip the deal directly making a pretty sum from using Malta’s hospitals as a commodity to which they added zero value. Now Steward are alleging the government brokered the transfer. Truly breath-taking audacity.

The takeover of the hospitals was formally announced by Steward in a statement out of their Boston HQ in February 2018. There was no mention of the difficulties evident from the start in that announcement. Nor that Steward had been approached by the government. On the contrary, Steward described the transaction as follows: “through the public-private partnership that resulted from Steward’s purchase of Vitals Global Healthcare’s concessions …” and so on.

We had known about Steward coming in for some time before that announcement. Watch this interview smug, patronising Chris Fearne gave Vanessa Macdonald in December 2017. Far from acknowledging evident difficulties from the start, Chris Fearne says VGH were slightly delayed because of planning permits and ancient Roman finds. He assured the interviewer Steward agreed to accelerate the pace to make up for time lost by VGH at no extra cost to taxpayers. But there’s no mention of the government having approached Steward to take this over.

We now know Chris Fearne’s statement was false. Four years later the concessionaire, Steward, is saying there’s no way they can even start working on what was supposed 6 years ago to have been delayed by a pesky amphora because the terms of the deal are so “unbankable” no one would lend them the money to do the work.

But even as he spoke the words Chris Fearne’s statement rang false. At the time, questions to VGH and the government persisted. Look at this report from two days after that Chris Fearne interview. Claire Caruana and Keith Micallef report the government had been informed about VGH’s intention to sell its concession but had made no announcement.

They quote an OPM spokesman who “would not say how long VGH had been eyeing the sale of the concession but confirmed that the government was informed of the negotiations three months ago.” Note: the government is informed of negotiations. That’s a million miles from the government approaching Steward which is what Nadine Delicata is today claiming had happened.

The timing of this nugget of information publicly provided by Steward cannot be coincidental. Just yesterday Times of Malta reported that the Swiss firm that paid consultancy fees to Joseph Muscat received payments on behalf of Vitals Global Healthcare from the hospitals’ takeover deal. The information is confirmed by Steward Healthcare Malta. Jacob Borg reports that “the American company had previously ignored several rounds of questions sent to it before November,” meaning that for their reasons they find it is no longer to their advantage to continue to refuse to answer.

You are invited to draw your own conclusions. It would seem to me that Steward has a gun to Robert Abela’s head. Either the government gives them more money or they will provide explicit evidence that Joseph Muscat brokered the transfer from VGH to Steward and part of the transfer agreement was to cover the cost of his brokerage fee, which has been suggested to have been in the region of €500,000. They come out with documentary evidence that backs such a thing and Joseph Muscat will have to deliver very many more announcements from his Burmarrad washroom especially since the police won’t need to look for evidence in his children’s school bags any longer.

The value of the transfer from VGH to Steward was guaranteed by a combination of two factors.

From the point of view of the vendors (VGH), Joseph Muscat added the value to them by, in the words of Nadine Delicata, leaving VGH’s owners “unattended, with a massive amount of taxpayer money, with no one checking up on how they were delivering on their commitments.”

From the point of view of the buyers (Steward), Joseph Muscat added the value to them by committing to them, as prime minister, that, in the words of Nadine Delicata, “the terms of the deal would be renegotiated to make the concession viable.”

I am reaching here. These are suppositions purely based on the hints being put out by Steward Health Care. I have no doubt Joseph Muscat will continue to deny any wrongdoing. But what Nadine Delicata may very well be suggesting in words she did not speak is that to secure his own fees Joseph Muscat allowed VGH to run riot with public funds and promised Steward he would let them run riot with even more public funds than VGH had done.

She will deny suggesting the second half of that premise. But her admission that Steward was given two weeks to decide whether to buy the VGH shares despite what she claims (credibly) as immediately evident difficulties is truly astonishing.

Given what any basic due diligence will have told them and given that the CEO of VGH Armin Ernst used to work for them and came back to work for them, the only thing that would have convinced them to buy the concession was their nudge, nudge, wink, wink agreement with Joseph Muscat. Consider that the author of this morning’s article was herself a senior VGH official, Vice President for Operations no less. And in today’s article she professes Steward Health Care’s “shock” that VGH did not keep management accounts, which she would have needed as a day to day tool for her job. And yet they bought it. And yet, without management accounts, they bought it.

Now it seems Steward are incensed that their oral agreement with Joseph Muscat is, to coin a phrase, not worth the paper it was written on. They played with the devil and now they are professing surprise that there’s a price to pay for the game.

It seems to me that Steward Health Care and or officials in its employ are accomplices in a crime that is no longer working out for them.

What is not in doubt is that either Chris Fearne was lying when he said no more money would be given to Steward than had been promised to VGH, or he didn’t know that someone else, I would suggest Joseph Muscat, was making that commitment behind his back.

Of course, Robert Abela’s head is the ham in the sandwich here because apart from Steward’s gun, our beleaguered prime minister also has Joseph Muscat’s gun to his head.

I flatter myself into thinking sometime in the future someone struggling to understand what happened to Malta in our days, might stumble on some of these articles. To them I say we are as perplexed in our times as they probably are in theirs. It is impossible for me to explain how this shit show of a government is tumbling inexorably towards a resounding election victory.