Scrutiny by the Opposition leader is not public scrutiny

Vitals ‘Global Healthcare’ has a medical board which it set up to lend a modicum of legitimacy to a clutch of crooks who struck their deal with the government before the public hospitals tender was out.

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Now a member of that board has been wheeled out to face the press instead of the company’s actual director and signatory, Ram Tumuluri. This is because Tumuluri is now correctly branded in the public mind as a penniless shyster and fraudster from rural British Columbia, who has left a trail of debt in his wake there, and who only six years ago was head of housekeeping at the village inn which he went on to take over and bankrupt.

That member of the medical board, Albert Fenech, has suggested a resolution to the current impasse about the secrecy in which the contracts are wrapped that have been signed with Konrad Mizzi, on behalf of the Government of Malta. This would be the “simple expedient” of showing those contracts to the Opposition leader in private. But that is no resolution at all. The Opposition leader is not the public, and scrutiny by the Opposition leader is not public scrutiny. Mr Fenech seems to belong to that category of people who think that anything which is scrutinised by politicians, we – journalists and members of the public – need not scrutinise ourselves. He doesn’t seem to have understood that this is exactly what the problem is here: that those contracts are currently the sole preserve of politicians. Having them scrutinised by other politicians does not change that scenario simply because the politicians are not from the same political party. It makes it more difficult for the government to hide things, yes, but the bottom line remains the same: that journalists and the public are expected to take a politician’s word for it, which is never a good idea, and for a whole host of reasons.

Mr Fenech seems to have put his good name, his reputation and the great respect in which he is held a far second to his desire to set up and be in charge of a cardiac care unit at a privatised public hospital. He has upset very many people, not least his friends, those who voted for him on the Nationalist Party ticket because they thought highly of him, those who campaigned for him and persuaded others to vote for him, and many of his patients who can see this hospital crookery for what it is and who are thoroughly dismayed that he is not only involved but sticking his neck out for them. If he didn’t know they were crooks then, he certainly knows now as the evidence floods in, and he himself said, in his interview with The Malta Independent, that anything in which Konrad Mizzi and Keith Schembri are involved is assumed to “stink to high heaven”.

But let’s leave that aside, because there is something else that should really be bothering us here, and it is this. Any attempt to give the Opposition leader an exclusive look at the details of Konrad Mizzi’s contracts with Ram Tumuluri should be resisted forcefully. Like other previous attempts which the Opposition leader illadvisedly went along with in the early days – accepting to be part of a ‘scrutiny committee’ for the sale of passports (which then met just once); being called in to a private meeting about the Malta Security Service and emerging to say that he is “reassured” – this would be just another attempt to make Simon Busuttil part of their corrupt mess by seeming to approve of what they have done after getting a look at it, or by compromising him as having been privy to the details.

Worse, it will create extreme difficulties for Busuttil with the Medical Association of Malta if he accepts an invitation (which is unlikely to transpire) to examine in private a contract which they have been agitating to examine themselves for weeks now, only to be given short shrift, along with the UHM, by the government and Minister Fearne.

Interestingly, Mr Fenech has not told us whether he has examined the contracts himself. The nature of those contracts does not seem to exercise him unduly. He appears content to have his former party leader examine it on his behalf, and to then reassure him that it’s all right even though he will not be permitted to tell him the contents. We do not all feel the same way. Mr Fenech may be unbothered by the fact that he does not know who owns the company he is working for, but the rest of us would quite like to know who will be running Malta’s public hospitals and, more crucially, why.