Lovin Malta carries an exclusive story stating that Health Minister Chris Fearne has confirmed that plans are underway to scrap a controversial deal which granted local medical supplier Technoline exclusive procurement rights for the St Luke’s, Karin Grech and Gozo hospitals.
“Both Steward Health Care and I don’t believe in a model of procurement that grants exclusivity to a single company,” Fearne told Lovin Malta. “Steward is working to reverse the [Technoline] contract.”
The procurement deal was signed in July 2017 by Vitals Global Healthcare (VGH), which ran the hospitals for around three years before financial problems forced it to sell its concession to American health giant Steward Health Care. The deal angered Technoline’s competitors, as they were forced to submit bids for equipment of those three hospitals to a direct competitor, giving it inside knowledge of their own prices.
The deal was signed only a few months after Technoline’s former manager Ivan Vassallo bought out the firm’s original shareholders, raising suspicion that he might have had been aware such a lucrative deal was in the pipeline.
The hidden owners of Vitals Global Healthcare, who were controversially awarded a hospitals’ privatisation contract they could not fulfil, reportedly funded the takeover of a medical equipment company that now has exclusivity with new hospital owners Steward Healthcare.
The agreement signed between Steward Healthcare and Vitals Global Healthcare, which transferred the concession of three of Malta’s public hospitals, has so far been hidden from public view.
At the same time, the company Technoline was granted exclusivity to supply medical equipment to the three hospitals formerly run by VGH, at a time when Tumuluri was taking decisions on how taxpayers’ money was being spent by Vitals to run three Maltese state hospitals.
MaltaToday reports that according to the share purchase agreement for the sale of VGH to Steward Healthcare, Tumuluri and Shaukat Ali used offshore companies in Jersey to grant a €5.14 million loan so that Vassallo buys out his boss and purchase Technoline in December 2016.
Shift News revealed that when VGH turned up in Malta, there was nothing ‘global’ to its name. Now we know they used payments by the Maltese government – they received over €50 million in taxpayers’ money – to prepare and build a network of companies that would bid for similar projects using the contract in Malta as a selling point in other countries. They were literally putting the ‘global’ in ‘Vitals Global Healthcare’.
The previously closely guarded Share Purchase Agreement that The Shift News is revealing in a series of articles reveals that while the ownership of VGH in Malta remained unchanged on paper, a material change of control happened back in April, 2017.
The Shift News had previously reported how on 13 October, 2016, 12 companies were quietly registered in Jersey, each with successive registration numbers and familiar names such as Vitals Global Healthcare Ltd and VGH Malta Ltd and interesting names such as VGH Montenegro Ltd and VGH Kosovo Ltd.
It was also shown how these companies were linked, through yet other Jersey companies, to former VGH frontman Ram Tumuluri and Shaukat Ali Abdul Ghafoor, a Pakistani businessman.
The Times reports ” that Health Minister Chris Fearne on Tuesday provided few answers as to where the millions paid by the government to Vitals Global Healthcare (VGH) went.
Despite a concession agreement which tied the government to forking out around €70 million annually to the company, questions have been raised about what VGH actually did with the money.”
Meanwhile, The Independent reports that a decision on whether to split up the lawsuits which had been filed by Leader of the Opposition Adrian Delia against the Vitals Global Healthcare hospital takeover is to be given in March, a court has said.
On Tuesday morning, Delia’s lawyers argued that the Judge hearing the Vitals case has every right to decide whether or not to split the cases, as had been requested by the Attorney General, in the manner he wishes.
