On Friday, Minister Konrad Mizzi had the audacity to tell our sister daily newspaper that it should ‘go ask the seller’ questions he was asked about the reasons why Vitals Global Healthcare (VGH) was selling off its 30-year concession to run state hospitals after just 21-months. Or, more simply put, just 5.8 per cent into the Public-Private partnership contract it signed with the government.

You just cannot make this stuff up. 

In the real world beyond this country’s shores that does not even seem to exist on the government’s radar, such comments would be simply laughable. But then again, in the real world, politicians who were caught with their pants down as they were in so many debacles, such politicians would have been out of a job a long, long time ago.

Mizzi said that the government does not enter into the sale process of a deal between two parties and that the transfer of shares was in accordance with the agreement between the government and VGH.

So instead of offering any sort of explanation as to why matters have taken such a turn, Mizzi’s advice was to ‘go ask the seller’, seemingly washing his hands of the whole affair when, in actual fact, it was his government, and him in particular, that was the actual seller of the state’s healthcare assets.

It seems that the government’s brass neck and its effrontery towards the public to which it is ultimately responsible is beyond belief. But then again, it is only until the public demands accountability from its political leaders that they will become accountable.

Next week the new owners of three of the country’s state hospitals will take over from where their predecessors left off, and yet these new owners are yet to make any sort of public statement and one wonders if they ever will at this rate.

Vitals was, and still is, a tiny, unknown company with absolutely no track record in healthcare, let alone in running a nation’s healthcare facilities. The company, as has been the case with other state assets that have been sold off by this government, is owned by persons unknown in a secretive jurisdiction where the Ultimate Beneficial Owners are not disclosed – this time the UBOs are buried deep in the corporate registry of the British Virgin Islands.

But the government appears to not be bothered about what Vitals has made from its Malta deal. Nor does it appear to be concerned about who the beneficiaries of the deal are. Like so many other deals, the beneficiaries of the hospitals deal remain hidden in a shady jurisdiction’s secret corporate registry, and they will perhaps never be known.

The minister appears to be treating the deal like one that does not concern the public and, indeed, the public normally need not be concerned with the wheelings and dealings between two private companies, as long as they are paying the appropriate amount of tax.

But when state assets are concerned, such matters are in the public interest. And when these state assets are assets that affect a country’s population on the most fundamental of levels, their very healthcare, the ante is upped further still.

Yet, the people are being treated rather insultingly, as though none of this is any of their business.

Questions from this newspaper about just how long he had been aware that VGH was in dire financial straits and unable to meet its commitments as a result have been sitting in Mizzi’s inbox, and in those of his aides, for a full three weeks now, and they still remain unanswered.

The public deserves transparency on this deal and, in fact, on all the other shady deals this government has signed, sealed and delivered since 2013, when it had made all those lofty pledges of accountability and transparency – pledges that were thrown out the window practically from day one.

And finally, if we were to give Mizzi the benefit of the doubt and take his advice to ‘go ask the seller’, the question remains: Who are the sellers?

Perhaps the minister knows the answer to that question, perhaps the people at the British Virgin Islands registry of companies may know that answer, but the Maltese public and press alike have absolutely no idea who the actual ‘sellers’ are, nor are they likely to ever know who has profited from this seemingly well-orchestrated heist.

Dr Mizzi, would you be so kind as to inform us who those sellers actually are so that we can act on your good advice?