Vitals’ owners are Singaporean Oxley Capital and founding partner Mark Pawley

The management of Vitals Global Healthcare, the company that will take over three Maltese hospitals, has insisted that the ultimate beneficial owner of a British Virgin Islands company whose ownership VGH falls under, is Mark Pawley.

Pawley appears as one of the directors of VGH in Malta, but he is the founding partner of Oxley Capital, a Singaporean private investment firm which manages some $1 billion in assets spread across real estate, renewables, natural resources and other investments in the Asia-Pacific region.

In notarial documents presented by VGH, the company said it was owned by Bluestone Special Situation 4 Limited, which was incorporated in 2007; the latter company is then owned by Asia Harimau Investments, also a BVI-registered company; which is in turn owned by Mark Pawley.

Speculation over the ownership of VGH was sparked by the fact that the Maltese holding companies that have been granted a 30-year concession to run the Gozo general hospital and the St Luke’s and Karin Grech hospitals, was owned by Bluestone Special Situation IV, the BVI company whose ownership was previously obscure.

The ownership was a sore point for the Opposition, which has accused the government of delaying the publication of its commercial agreement with VGH for the running of the hospitals.

VGH today said that in the coming months they will be collapsing the BVI structure and moving it to Jersey, another offshore location, which is also tax-free but which they said was fully transparent.

Prior to founding Oxley Capital, Pawley was COO of Asia Pacific Investment Banking from 2002 to 2005, served as COO of Credit Suisse’s Global Emerging Markets Coverage Group, and also as consultant to UBS.

On Thursday, health minister Chris Fearne did not reveal the ultimate beneficiary owners of Vitals Global Healthcare during Thursday night’s programme of Xtra. He responded by saying that the mother company of VGH – Bluestone Special Situations 4 – is managed by the Oxley Group. “It has fund managers who pour billions of euro into it,” he said, while insisting that the government had conducted due diligence tests on VGH.

Vitals Healthcare Ltd is owned by Bluestone Investments Malta Ltd, which is in turn owned by Bluestone Situation 4 Ltd – registered as an offshore company in the British Virgin Islands. “We are talking about boxes inside boxes inside boxes, which is ultimately owned by a company registered inside the British Virgin Islands,” shadow health minister Claudette Buttigieg said.

Buttigieg said that the Vitals deal stank of corruption, arguing that VGH’s companies were registered in Malta a few days before then health minister Konrad Mizzi had announced them as the preferred bidder in May 2015. She also noted that the contract was signed on 30 November 2015, two days before audit firm Nexia BT’s partner Karl Cini had e-mailed Mossack Fonseca, instructing the Panamanian law firm to open offshore companies for Mizzi and OPM chief of staff Keith Schembri. And on 19 May 2016, Konrad Mizzi – who had already been deposed as health minister, signed a side-letter to the contract with VGH director Ram Tumuluri.