Yesterday, the Times of Malta and MaltaToday missed some crucial details when reporting the announcement of Malta Enterprise’s new CEO, George Gregory. I will keep this brief to ensure the story is read as widely as possible.
Gregory – who’s taking over from former Joseph Muscat apparatchik Kurt Farrugia – was the former managing partner of RSM Malta, the Labour Party’s auditor. This was indeed reported by the two news portals mentioned above (though without mentioning the important caveat about RSM Malta’s professional relationship with the ruling party).
The most important detail they missed was the fact that Gregory was directly involved in the hospitals concession debacle, in two ways – as a member of the negotiation and steering committees appointed by the government and through the firm he managed, which was roped in as an external consultant on the deal.
Specifically, Gregory was involved in the adjudication process of the bids that were submitted at the government’s request. From those three bids, the committees Gregory was involved in determined that Vitals Global Healthcare (VGH) was the only compliant bidder, even though Daphne Caruana Galizia’s reporting had already made it apparent that the company’s background had more holes in it than Swiss cheese.
It is also crucial to note that we knew the deal was a stitch-up the minute we learned the government had signed a secret agreement with VGH months before the official request for proposals was issued.
Two months ago, Gregory was testifying in the criminal case against disgraced former health minister Chris Fearne and his former associates and colleagues. He did so in his former capacity as a member of the committees that were responsible for determining whether VGH was fit to manage three hospitals and invest a princely sum of €200 million (which, of course, never happened).
When the defence asked Gregory about how exactly the government’s committees determined VGH’s fitness for the deal, he stated that no due diligence on the ultimate beneficial owners of VGH was carried out. In spite of the serious doubts which Daphne’s reporting had raised about VGH’s finances – doubts which were later proven to be 100% valid – Gregory also told the court that they had not bothered to look into the source of financing which VGH claimed to have.
Generally speaking, Gregory’s testimony was useless as he claimed to not have any recollection about fundamental details of the meetings he attended as part of his responsibilities as a member of these committees. You can watch our full NEWZ MILL-QORTI report from that date below.
Is this his reward for forgetting all that had happened?
The entire system is built on rewarding the corrupt, so I’d hardly be surprised if that was the case. In fact, there is no other reasonable conclusion (unless we are to believe that Gregory’s recollection of events is indeed as spotty as he claims it is).
Why has Gregory’s important and certainly rotten involvement in the Vitals deal not been given the exposure it necessitates.?
I got ‘lucky’ with this story in the sense that I happened to be both the journalist reporting from court as well as the journalist scanning the headlines for such formal announcements. In the case of Times of Malta and MaltaToday, it seems like there was a disconnect between court reporters (who would have probably recognised George Gregory’s rather unique name in the same way I did) and the staff reporters who copied and pasted the official announcement.
Of course, I am being charitable with this interpretation, because a quick Google search for Gregory’s background before parroting the official announcement would have likely yielded search results from live blogs citing Gregory’s name.