Former OPM Chief of Staff Keith Schembri has, in a sworn statement, denied any involvement in the negotiation of the Memorandum of Understanding with investors behind Vitals Global Healthcare.

The once missing Memorandum of Understanding between the government and Vitals Global Healthcare "strongly supports" the National Audit Office's (NAO) conclusion that the tender process was "staged and deceitful", the same NAO said in a statement on Tuesday.

The NAO noted that a meeting with the investors was convened at the Office of the Prime Minister, before the MoU was signed, by the Chief of Staff of the then-Prime Minister, Keith Schembri. This was stated to the NAO by Malta Enterprise's Principal Chief Officer, who said that Malta Enterprise was not involved in the identification of the investors for the project..

The NAO said that attempts to get Schembri's views on the subject were to no avail - a point which is referred to another three times in the report.

"The role played by the OPM in the formulation of the project assumed a more definite form based on the information provided to the NAO by the Minister for the Economy and the Principal Chief Officer Malta Enterprise", the NAO found. "Notwithstanding this, many gaps persist in this Office's understanding of the process leading to the MoU. These gaps result from the fact that no records were retained by the OPM in relation to the MoU and attempts at sourcing information from the former Chief of Staff OPM proved to no avail. Despite the NAO's efforts at deciphering the active role played by the OPM, this remains obscure", the NAO said.

In a sworn statement published on Facebook, Schembri said that he did not negotiate the MoU, did not sign it, did not write it and had no involvement in it.

He said that the person responsible on the part of Malta Enterprise was Mario Galea (the former CEO) and that he does not know who else was involved.

Schembri said that his only involvement was on the request of the Economy ministry and Malta Enterprise to provide a room at Castille for the MoU to be signed, and that was it.

He said that he received a letter from the NAO that arrived on 27 July that stipulated that he needed to provide answers to questions by 24 July, "three days before the letter arrived." He said that aside from the late letter that arrived on the eve of publication, nobody sent for him to explain what he knows about the MoU.

Schembri said that as far as he knows, Economy Minister Chris Cardona, while having signed the MoU, was not involved in the negotiations.

He said that for a few it has become easy to take aim at him for all that was attributed to the government during Joseph Muscat's time as Prime Minister.