The entire government, both the Konrad Mizzi faction and the Chris Fearne faction, seems in an almighty eagerness to get us to stop looking backwards and to look forward, to sweep all this Vitals business under the carpet.

But no, we refuse to be hurried and we refuse to stop looking backwards and especially we refuse to buy the government spin that everything will be hunky dory and glorious in the future. We have been had once too often with spin like this.

Every day that passes is revealing more and more details that show what a bad deal that was. It is just not enough that the VGH contract is being examined by the Audit Office. We – the Maltese public, that is – want to know everything, from beginning to end, from conception to birth to death. And most of our questions will not be asked by the AO for the simple reason that they fall beyond the AO’s terms of reference.

People tend to focus on those phrases in the VGH contract that were blacked out, following the tried and tested pattern that one tends to focus on what is prohibited – in this case on the phrases and sentences that were blacked out.

But in the end, even without knowing what was covered up, these phrases may not be the most important issue.

The three hospitals that were dumped on VGH – Gozo General Hospital, St Luke’s and Karen Grech – were and still are part of the National Health Service. And this service was – and still is – completely free for Maltese citizens.

At the time, the government sold this operation as preserving the free aspect of healthcare and that Vitals would be injecting huge amounts of capital into refurbishing and upgrading these three hospitals. Even at the time, many wondered how this could be done – it was as if someone expected the buildings to fly.

But the government was persuasive that, with some €80 million a year handed to VGH, this could be done. Now we discover that the €80 million was not to pay employees’ salaries, which continued to be paid by the government. And Vitals soon ended up facing financial trouble which led it to sell the VGH deal with the Government of Malta to Stewards Healthcare, the new operator.

It cannot be that the money went into the purchase of new and needed equipment (the total equipment changed hands for one euro) because little or nothing was purchased. l-Orizzont of some days ago carried a list of work that was done, mainly begun, but there was no evident plan and mainly no itemisation of the work done.

That’s just it: the country wants to know what happened to the money it forked out. It wants to know how Vitals ended up not being able to pay. And it also wants to know if Vitals made money by selling its share to Steward.

Now Minister Konrad Mizzi (again, not Chris Fearne – the same dichotomy) announced that Stewards will be coming to Malta this coming week. It would have been far more useful if Vitals came and gave some explanations instead of being a shady group with most of the protagonists never even revealing their names. When calls were made for sessions at a Parliamentary Committee where questions could be asked and, hopefully, replies given, the government refused and went instead for a debate in plenary where no questions would be asked. And this time the Opposition stayed, instead of walking out.

When, some day, the Auditor General finishes his report on the VGH deal and publishes the results and, hopefully, the Opposition asks for a series of debates at the Public Accounts Committee and insists on questioning the VGH people, maybe then we will get to know who came up with this deal and what were the financial bases on which the deal was structured and we will thus see how they all got it so wrong.

Adrian Delia says the deal was so written in order to fail – and so that someone would profit from selling the deal to someone else. Maybe this is true and maybe it is not.

The Daphne Caruana Galizia faction inside the PN claim that this bad deal is the result of corruption and point to Konrad Mizzi and Ram Tumuluri, one of the VGH top men and fellow investor in the British Virgin Islands. One would have to get proof of that, which is not always available.

But one thing is now certain – the deal was a bad deal and the more we find out about it, the more we cannot understand how any self-respecting government could have entered into such a bad deal. From the beginning, people of all persuasions were saying that it smelt bad but the government went ahead with it. Now the deal has collapsed and the country must insist on finding out what really happened.

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