In a newspaper article in March this year, the President of the Medical Association of Malta, Gordon Caruana Dingli, wrote about what any reform of our health system needed. “There should be a comprehensive national health policy determined by patient and social needs,” he said, “and not by business priorities.”

Why would a prominent surgeon, writing in the name of his medical colleagues, feel the need to write this?

In connection with health, “business priorities” (as opposed to patient needs) is code for privatisation.

Mr Caruana Dingli was writing at around the time of the announcement of an “agreement” (what’s happened to that?) with Barts for the hospital in Gozo. Could he and his colleagues have been picking up significant danger signals, from the Barts MOU and other developments, which could threaten our health system?

Our doctors are well versed in what’s been happening to the National Health Service in the UK since the 2012 Health and Social Care Act. It was the pet project of the then Conservative health secretary, Andrew Lansley. In the British Medical Journal, the policies associated with the changes were said to point, inevitably, to privatisation.

Lord David Owen, a former Labour foreign secretary and co-founder of the UK’s Social Democrats, has made it his personal mission to try and reverse what he defines as “the deeply damaging effects of the 2012 Health and Social Care Act.” In a nutshell this Act has, as Lord Owen puts it, pushed “the NHS down the American healthcare route, creating an external market and mandating the compulsory marketisation and commercialisation of services.” Does this ring a bell?

Those defending the Act claim that there is no privatisation of the NHS. Lansley has said the accusations are ludicrous. But many experts disagree.

Konrad Mizzi has taken the Lansley line with me in Parliament. On Tuesday, while answering my parliamentary questions, he too insisted that the recent announcement of the investment in three of our hospitals is not privatisation and that I shouldn’t call it so.

However, we are supposed to take him at his word. We are not being shown the tender documents, the memorandum of understanding and any other agreement connected to the announcement that the preferred bidder was chosen.

I asked him to table those documents to demonstrate that what is going on is not (or will not inevitably lead to) privatisation.

All he did was to insist each time that this is not privatisation. However, he did not table the documents because … wait for it … nothing... has been signed with the preferred bidder.

We are supposed to take his word for it. But what is Konrad Mizzi’s word worth these days? Zilch.

Something else that is very, very interesting came out of his answers to my PQs. There were three bidders but the two which were not chosen were “not fit for purpose” (to use Mizzi’s favourite phrase). I invite you to look into who these two losing bidders are.

The only Maltese company of the three has a director who actually works at the Foundation for Medical Services. In other words, he works for the same entity that wrote the tender documents and also chose the bidders. Obviously this is a major conflict of interest that disqualifies him automatically.

The other bidder is an Indian company which hardly has the staff and capital to run a clinic. In no halfway decent country would it have had any hope of winning the contract.

The minister sees nothing wrong in having two hopeless bidders out of three because, after all, they were not chosen.

In the world of Taghna Lkoll, let’s face it, the fact that someone hopeless was not chosen is a major achievement.

By EU standards, however, what we have is a major scandal. This was no real bidding process at all. Two of the three were not real bidders since they never had a chance. Once again, we have the stench of a done deal.

No wonder Muscat, Mizzi and Keith Fearne have been boasting of a €200 million investment since March 2015. That is, before the tendering process even opened.

I wonder who came up with this cunning plan. It must be someone very close to Joseph Muscat or to Castille or both. Any surprise if he or she is getting a hefty commission for this deal, very hefty indeed?

The sheer sleaze and scum oozing out of Muscat's government on a daily basis should be shocking us all. If they’re not, it’s probably because we think that by shrugging we can keep our sanity. It’s the other way round. In a sane world, scandals should scandalise.