MPs Who Vote For Budget Will Be Breaking The Law, Adrian Delia Claims As He Calls Out ‘Corrupt’ Steward Contract
Any MP that votes in favour of the budget will effectively be breaking the law, Nationalist MP Adrian Delia has claimed, insisting that doing so would mean signing off on payments established by a corrupt contract.
“I am warning all MPs… if they vote in favour of this budget, they will be breaking the law because they will be voting to spend the Maltese and Gozitan people’s money on a corrupt contract as acknowledged by the company receiving the money,” Delia said.
“This is no longer a matter of collective responsibility, this is now about personal responsibility.”
Delia was speaking during a PN press conference on the budget’s healthcare allocation, during which he referred a Shift News report last week in which he said Steward Health Care – the owner of the concession for the running of three of Malta’s state hospitals – had acknowledged in court that the contract through which the concession was originally awarded to Vitals Global Healthcare was “fraudulent and corrupt”.
Steward Health Care took over the concession for the running of the hospitals from VGH in February 2018. The contract awarded to VGH has been mired in corruption allegations, with the company failing to meet any of its targets before selling the concession.
Talks between Steward and the government on the possibility of terminating the contract have been ongoing for a while now, but it has been revealed that any termination of the contract would make the Maltese government liable to pay Steward €100 million.
Delia stressed that there was no way that a payment stemming from a corrupt contract could be approved, and insisted that, unless the government somehow issued a denial to the report, the payments could not be approved.
The government, he said, was agreeing to pay “clean money for a corrupt contract”, questioning which bank could process such payments.
“We all know how complicated banking has become, all the checks that need to be made even on relatively small transactions. So you’re telling me we have a bank that is accepting millions every week when it knows the money is corrupt?” Delia said.
He lashed out at the government for not having addressed the allegations in the report despite four days having passed since its publication.
Serious attention needed on mental health
The press conference was also addressed by the party’s healthcare spokesperson Stephen Spiteri and its mental health spokesperson Mario Galea.
Galea urged the government to finally put its money where its mouth is and to make mental health in the country a priority.
He referred to a speech he gave in Parliament this week where he opened about his own struggles with depression in which he admitted to even having contemplated suicide in the past.
“I would have not been here had I not sought help,” Galea said, explaining that he had not opened up about his experience for pity.
He noted that it had been repeatedly shown that public personalities speaking out about their experience with such issues helped those who might not be seeking help because of social stigma.
Out of every 100 people struggling with depression in Malta, only 30 sought help, Galea noted, stressing that stigma was the main obstacle to most people speaking to someone.
“We need to seriously focus on the problem of mental health,” Galea said, urging the government to reinstate the crisis intervention team which he said had been stopped by the Labour administration.
Galea also insisted that the idea that not speaking about suicide prevented people from taking their life was untrue. He urged the public to take people who said they were contemplating suicide seriously while calling for an extensive and far-reaching educational campaign on the subject.
Mental health must become a priority. “We can’t make the mistake of separating the brain from the rest of the body… There can be no health without mental health.”
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