Police searched former Prime Minister Joseph Muscat’s home today as part of a corruption investigation into Vitals Global Healthcare.

Times of Malta reported that financial crimes police entered Muscat’s Burmarrad home at around 7am and spent some three hours then, seizing his phone, as well as the phones of his wife Michelle and their two daughters.

Muscat said the police asked him for information related to money in “consultancy fees” he had received from Accutor AG, the Swiss company which had worked with Steward Healthcare, the company which purchased the hospital concession from VGH.

He said he had already prepared all of this information in a file since November, with information including proof of the work he did with Accutor AG and the trips he had taken abroad related to this work.

Muscat said that none of the work he carried out with Accutor AG had anything to do with the hospital deal.

The former Prime Minister said he had been tipped off about this planned search by someone within the Nationalist Party, that PN MP Jason Azzopardi had been spreading the word, and that he was only half-surprsied when the police knocked on his door this morning.

Muscat denounced the police search as “theatrics”, said their decision to confiscate his children’s phones was “excessive” and that his faith in the magisterial inquiry has been dented.