It's been a long while since I have read a statement as stupidly deceitful as that released by Vitals 'Global Healthcare' a couple of days ago, in response to the lurid but factual news reports about its frontman Ram Tumuluri's very recent past in British Columbia. Really, who do they think they're kidding? The statement is insulting in its contempt for even the most basic intelligence of those who read it, and is easily ripped to shreds by simple deconstruction.
"VGH regularly carries out due diligence investigations on all its executives and directors," it says. That is the most fascinating somersault of a giant whopper, because it wasn't VGH which came first, but Ram Tumuluri. Tumuluri was in meetings with the government of Malta long before Vitals 'Global Healthcare' was incorporated, even before the government issued the tender, and when he first set up the company, it wasn't even called Vitals, but Vitalis. And he and Mark Pawley are the only two directors of the company, so any instructions to carry out due diligence on "its executives and directors" have got to come from those two. This makes so much sense, doesn't it? Mark Pawley and Ram Tumuluri incorporate a company in Malta, then at their first board meeting - which is probably a telephone call - they say, "Hey, we should commission a due diligence investigation into ourselves and our business history." I don't think so. But that's the only way it could happen, which is what I mean when I say that Vitals 'Global Healthcare's' statement is gratuitously offensive and untruthful.
Next: "To date, all due diligence carried out on Mr Tumuluri has been clean, and contains none of the aforementioned allegations." This due diligence is rather like the 'international audit' which the Prime Minister said he commissioned into his pet minister's secret financial affairs - that is, it didn't happen. As we have seen in the previous paragraph, the only person in Vitals 'Global Healthcare' who is authorised to commission a due diligence exercise into Ram Tumuluri is Ram Tumuluri himself, as he is the company's sole executive director. Of course, it is the government of Malta which should have commissioned an intensive due diligence exercise into this stranger who cropped up out of nowhere, and it should have done. But Tumuluri was obviously introduced to that outfit at the top by a mysterious and oblique fixer, so they took him on trust.
Allegations? There were no allegations, but only facts borne out by documents deposited in the Supreme Court of British Columbia, which is in Vancouver, and downloaded here in Malta, as the magic world of the internet permits, making it very difficult for shady characters like this one to hide events in which he was involved as recently as five years ago.
Then we get a lecture from these highly suspect characters: "It is VGH's stance that before any allegations are levelled in public, fact-checking and basic due diligence rules should be observed, rather than plainly repeating unsubstantiated accusations from questionable sources, leading to reputational damage for people and organisations." You have to laugh. Well, I most certainly did, at the sheer nerve of these people. Did I say people? We're talking one man here, who was head of housekeeping at a rural motel in British Columbia just six years ago, and washed up in Malta to operate three public hospitals on a budget of €55 million a year, after leaving a trail of financial wreckage in his wake in BC, including an inn that had to be sold under the hammer by the mortgage company which repossessed it, and a lakeside lodge whose bank accounts he emptied before he fled - and this according to the investor who he left holding the baby, in a telephone interview with David Thake. That investor will not have been anonymous to Tumuluri, who knows exactly who he is and what he's talking about.
The Labour Party/government's only response to the media's revelations about Ram Tumuluri and Vitals 'Global Healthcare' is to say, "Nah nah nah, Albert Fenech and Mark Brincat are on the medical board. If it's OK for them, it should be OK for everyone else and for the bitter Nationalist Party and all those liars out there."
Ah, but here's the thing - did Mr Fenech and Mr Brincat know the details of this shifty mess, or are they only finding out now with the rest of us? Either way, they're in a bit of a bind, and they're going to be the ones suffering reputational damage if they carry on allowing their names to be used by this crock of corruption. At this late stage in their lives - for they're both in their 60s with a thriving private practice - they most certainly don't need Ram Tumuluri and Vitals 'Global Healthcare', but Ram Tumuluri and Vitals 'Global Healthcare' needs them as a sort of publicity crutch.
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