Sweetheart deals are nothing new when it comes to attracting foreign direct investment into a country, and Malta has in the past entered into several arrangements with the private sector, which received advantageous terms in return for investing in the country and employing its workers.
But these sweetheart deals take on a completely new ominous context when it is suspected that members of government are benefitting in one way or another from such deals.
In Malta, there are three glaring examples that absolutely need to be investigated thoroughly and at all costs: the Crane Currency, the ElectroGas and the Vitals Global Healthcare deals.
This newspaper last week carried the news that the European Commission is investigating the Crane Currency deal over the suspected granting of illegal state aid. This comes after the government rolled out the red carpet, and the accompanying incentives, to bring the company, and possibly the lucrative costs of servicing the company's currency printing machinery to a company owned by the Prime Minister's chief of staff, to Malta.
That is, however, not the only curiosity in this case: right after securing the deal, the company was sold off to another party for around US$800 million. That deal led none other than former Prime Minister and current MEP Alfred Sant to raise his eyebrows and question 'what, exactly, is going on?' Sant rightly pointed out that the deal Crane had finalised in Malta had driven its real value to a much higher level than that shown in its audited financial accounts.
Then there was the Delimara power station deal. This newspaper has reported extensively, almost ad nauseam, on how the lead developer of the project was a certain Gasol, a tiny company without a credible track record and which was ultimately controlled by a brass-plate company registered at Mossack Fonseca's offices in the secretive jurisdiction of the Seychelles.
That company's exact role in the consortium and in the project is still unknown to this day. The company exited the project as soon as the deal and its financing were arranged, specifically in the same week in July 2015 in which the financing package was finalised and signed. Nor is it known what liquidation Gasol pocketed from the disposal of its 30 per cent share on exiting the then taxpayer-guaranteed project. Several millions are believed to have been made. Curiously, the details of the Malta deal were not reported in the company last financial statements, and there was only a gaping hole on the page where those details were meant to have been published.
Similarly, Vitals Global healthcare was a tiny, unknown company with absolutely no track record in healthcare, let alone in running state facilities. And again, the company is owned by persons unknown in the secretive jurisdiction of the British Virgin Islands, and that company, like Gasol, is exiting Malta by selling its concession after just 21 months of operations.
Moreover, like Gasol, the government appears to not be bothered about what it made from the deal. Nor does it appear to be concerned about who the beneficiaries of the deal are. Like the power station deal, the beneficiaries of the hospitals deal remain hidden in a shady jurisdiction's secret corporate registry, and they will perhaps never be known save for a fortuitous Panama Papers style leak.
Thanks to the Opposition, this case will also be investigated by the courts after PN leader Adrian Delia took the issue to court.
In all three cases – Gasol, Vitals and Crane – the companies enter into sweetheart deals with the government, see their value driven upwards by the attractive incentives offered by the government, and sell out at a profit which is in most cases earned off the back of the Maltese taxpayer.
Like Dr Sant asked: 'What, exactly, is going on?
The other question is: in addition to these high-profile, multi-million euro deals, how many other smaller ones have there been that no one knows anything about?
from The Malta Independent https://ift.tt/2IGJBLe
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