The police today held an investigation into the house of the former Prime Minister of Malta Joseph Muscat in a corruption survey on an agreement that his government has entered into the management of three state hospitals to the minimum well-known Vitals Global Healthcare Group in 2016.
Muscat confirmed the police investigation in a Facebook post, saying police arrived to search his home at 7 a.m. and also confiscated his cell phone as well as those of his wife and teenage daughters.
The Times of Malta reported in November how the former prime minister received 60,000 euros from Accutor AG, a Swiss company affiliated with the American group Steward Health Care, which took over the contract with Vitals Global Healthcare in 2018.
The alleged payments have been included in the corruption investigation, but Muscat has repeatedly stated that he did not commit any criminal offense.
“I was paid for consulting work carried out after my departure from power, work that was not linked to Malta or to hospitals and was fully documented and on which I paid tax,” he said today.
The Times of Malta reported that police had been inside Muscat’s home in the village of Bourarad, in northern Malta, for more than three hours.
The former prime minister stressed that he was not “particularly surprised” by the investigation, as he had been informed that an opposition MP and lawyer had reportedly made reports about the investigation in recent days. The search, he said, was “pointless theatricality” and the fact that even his teenage girls’ cell phones were confiscated was exaggerated.
He added that as soon as the story of the payments he had received was published in November, he had prepared a file of documents, ready to hand over to a judge, and he did so as soon as the police appeared.
The police did not comment.
Muscat resigned in January 2020 after media reports revealed that he and his chief of staff had a close friendship with the influential businessman Jorgen Fenech, who is awaiting trial for the 2017 car crash of journalist Daphne Caruana Galli.
Source: ΑΠΕ-ΜΠΕ
The former prime minister has not been linked to the assassination.
Source From: Capital
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