Scrapping the hospitals deal with Steward Healthcare would be “easy and populist” but not necessarily the right decision, Prime Minister Robert Abela has said.

“It’s easy to be populist and it would have been easy for me to say that I wasn’t involved in this deal and will scrap it,” Abela told a political rally in Naxxar. “However, things don’t work like that. When you’re in charge of a country, you have many responsibilities that you must analyse collectively before taking decisions that make sense for our patients’ health and the economy and which don’t place an unnecessary financial burden on the country.”

Abela said an internal committee has finished analysing the controversial concession, which was originally granted to Vitals Global Healthcare to upgrade and oversee the St Luke’s, Karin Grech and Gozo hospitals and later sold to US healthcare firm Steward Healthcare.

“There’s a lot of good in these contracts, such as the direction we need to go but there were parts of them that didn’t satisfy me. We took stock of the situation, have all the facts in hand and now have a clear vision of where we want to go. The first decision we took this week is that Steward must honour all the conditions they have tied themselves down to; afterwards we can sit around a table and discuss. That’s how a serious government operates and that’s how we will be.”

Sunday Times of Malta reported today that the committee which analysed the deal concluded that Steward owes the government between €12 and €15 million in arrears, money which had previously been subject to waivers.

“The decision taken by the Prime Minister was that from now on, Steward will have to stick to the letter of the concession agreement,” a source told the newspaper. “Waivers were given in the past, at times in writing, allowing the company not to pay taxes when they were due. From now on, there will be no such waivers.”

However, Steward also believes the government owes them around €18 million and wrote to Abela this week to claim that they are basically subsidising Maltese healthcare at this stage.