The adjournment was about the Mater Dei hospital. Dr Sant said the issue was one of national importance. Dr Sant said that in 1996, the project was already a shambles with tens of millions of liri being spent and no one knew where. “And the situation is still pretty much the same,” he said.

The hospital was built and developed in such a way that it cannot function autonomously and that it would have to work in tandem with St Luke’s Hospital. He said that there were three possibilities identified by the Management Efficiency Unit – Tal-Qroqq on its own, St Luke’s on its own or to just keep on with the shambles of a plan that the previous government had drafted.

Dr Sant said the MLP government could not rescind the contract which the PN government had negotiated with Skanska. However, the MLP negotiated for the Foundation for Medical Services to keep an eye on the building and design of the hospital. “We wanted it to be the middleman between government and Skanska. We wanted that hospital to be the new general hospital and we were going to dispose of St Luke’s,” he said.

Dr Sant said that in March 2000, Health Minister Louis Deguara began to boast that Skanska told him the hospital could be built at a cost of Lm83 million, Lm17 million less than we had projected,” he said.

He said that in March 2000, Opposition MP Michael Falzon had spoken in parliament and said it was imperative that the designers be autonomous from the constructors.

“We said this four years ago and now the government is saying the same thing,” he said. “We told them it was madness, you cannot have the same people designing, building and issuing government’s money to buy everything,” he said.

Up to last year, the FMS was spending Lm114 million of public funds, he said. “Even now, the government doesn’t know when it is going to be functioning. And it is not going to cost anything less than Lm200 million,” he said.

Dr Sant also questioned the repeated postponed dates of when the hospital was to be completed. “What a mess. They should have done what we told them in the first place, have separate entities for design, implementation and construction so you can have checks and balances. This stuff is elementary,” he said.

He also questioned the wisdom of putting the same people on the team to negotiate with Skanska, which had got the project into its current state.

Dr Sant said the waste of money in the building of the hospital was: “Absolutely obscene. Someone must have his finger in the pie.” Dr Sant said the country was going down the drain and that the practices of the government had to stop.

“Dr Gonzi cannot tell us to rein in our expenses, while at the same time wasting millions on the hospital and the Brussels property. And who is carrying the burden?

The middle class, the workers, the elderly and the Air Malta employees.

We cannot keep going on in this manner.”