Opinion: Chris Fearne Must Shoulder Political Responsibility After Landmark Vitals-Steward Court Ruling
It should never have come to this, and Health Minister Chris Fearne should know this.
Adrian Delia is rightfully being lavished with praise for today’s court ruling but if this is a victory for Malta, then it’s a bittersweet one.
The fact is it had to take Delia, in his capacity as a Maltese MP, to bring this case to court and spend the next five years locked in a legal battle against the government.
He has been cautious about this aspect, but from what I understand he did so despite knowing a loss would have exposed him to significant personal financial risk. It was a €4 billion value case after all, the largest value dispute Malta’s courts has ever seen.
Joseph Muscat and Konrad Mizzi are facing the lion’s share of the flak for this judgement – justifiably, as they had overseen it – but Fearne had a large part to play too.
Fearne was Parliamentary Secretary for Health between 2014 and 2016 and Health Minister since then, and he should long have harboured suspicions that something was wrong with the deal.
After all, assassinated journalist Daphne Caruana Galizia had reported serious irregularities in the way the concession was granted as far back as 2015.
I would like to give Fearne the benefit of the doubt as much as possible. Although I think he was too quick and willing to impose restrictions during the COVID-19 pandemic, he has overall done a good job managing an extremely delicate sector.
It says a lot about his qualities that his former PL leadership rival Robert Abela kept him in the role after becoming Prime Minister.
However, the fact is he had ample chances to scrap the deal but chose not to.
Towards late 2017, it became clear that despite receiving several millions of euro from the government every year and barely even upgrading the hospitals that had been granted to them, Vitals had run into serious financial problems and couldn’t even afford to pay their bills or staff’s salaries.
Their successors Steward would later say that the mess Vitals left behind was “worse than people realise” and included a staggering amount of unpaid VAT that the authorities never detected because they had left them unaudited.
Steward warned that the concession itself had become unbankable and that no bank would finance a loan to finance the construction of new hospitals.
Fearne wouldn’t have been expected to delve into the nitty-gritty of it all but he surely must have known something was badly wrong.
After all, here was a company with no healthcare management experience that had clearly reached a deal with the government before a tender was issued, that had reneged on its commitments to upgrade three hospitals and was now in financially dire straits, with money unaccounted for.
Yet, rather than scrapping the deal, ordering an investigation into how Vitals’ taxpayer money was spent and then perhaps launching a new, clean public tender that Steward could have won fair and square, Fearne oversaw the direct transfer of the suspicious concession to the US giant. These are the “real deal”, he promised the nation.
If reports are to be believed, Cabinet – which included Fearne – even approved a €100 million payout to Steward that would kick in if a court orders the scrapping of the concession. If that now stands, it means another €100 million of taxpayer money vanished in return for zero public gain.
Police should now investigate accordingly and government should immediately act to recover the millions of euro that remain unaccounted for but it shouldn’t end there.
The sad reality is that absolutely nothing would have happened had Delia not filed a case.
A concession that was awarded on dubious grounds would have remained in place to save the government a potential political fallout. An MP had to expose himself financially and spend significant time and resources pushing the government to take action which, as judge Depasquale noted, would have been in the public interest. Even then, the government fought back.
The government should lead by example and not delay action until a court forces its back to the wall. As the minister in charge of the health sector for years, who had publicly backed this deal for years, Fearne should be the first to assume political responsibility for this mess.
What action should be taken after today’s court ruling?