A Court decision on the case regarding Steward Health Care’s concession to run three hospitals in Malta and Gozo has been postponed to February 24.

A decision was initially expected to be given on Tuesday morning, but in a decree on Monday Judge Francesco Depasquale said that due to the complexity of the case, the court needed more time to finalize its decision.

PN Deputy Adrian Delia (when he was Leader of the Opposition) in 2018 brought a case where he asked the courts to declare the agreement between the government of Malta and Vitals Global Healthcare (VGH) – from that -the time replaced by Steward Health Care – null and void, with the argument that the franchisee had failed to adhere to the obligations established in the contract.

The VGH was granted the hospital concession in 2015. Steward Health Care had replaced VGH after the former took over the concession, thus taking over the management of San Luqa hospital, Karin Grech hospital and Gozo General Hospital in -2018.

The original franchisee, Vitals Global Healthcare, was quite controversial. The National Audit Office, in a statement on an audit report it published in 2021 on the concession granted to Vitals Global Healthcare by the government, had said: “None of the main milestones of the concession have been reached when the franchise was under the control of VGH. VGH’s inability to secure funding was the crucial failure on which all the subsequent failures registered in this concession by the government rested.”

The existence of a 2019 side letter was revealed by MaltaToday, which turned any termination of the concession into a government default, and could result in the government having to pay €100m to the company in a case like this.

The Prime Minister Robert Abela had said, back in 2021 when asked about the €100m, that if Steward had chosen to leave the concession, “the government will do everything that is legally possible to avoid paying that amount’. He had said that he found out about this 2019 agreement only after it was signed.