San Raffaele on verge of financial collapse

San Raffaele hospital – founded and run by Don Luigi Verze’ – is in severe financial straits and Magistrates in Milan are already looking into the matter with a view to initiate prosecutions over bankruptcy.

The huge deficit – almost €900 million – was discovered by investigators who were looking into the suicide a week ago of Mario Cal, the hospital’s financial controller and Don Verze’s right hand man.

According to investigators, Cal killed himself as the losses could not be hidden anymore and creditors started to gang up and sequester assets belonging to the hospital’s foundation, ‘Monte Tabor’.

Some €10 million in losses were made by a New Zealand registered company Assion Aircraft & Yachting which operates Don Verze’s private airplane, but the bulk of the losses - some €400 million - have been made from a research laboratory in Brazil that was engineering a no-pip grape for medical purposes.

The Vatican has stepped in to help find solutions to the crisis and has appointed Giovanni Maria Flick to assist the board of directors at San Raffaele to fend off the threat of bankruptcy proceedings by the Milan magistrates.

“We need some time to address a number of issues,” Flick reportedly told Milan investigators yesterday, only to be given notice that all accounting records are to be seized on Monday.

San Raffaele hospital is not new to Malta. During the 1990’s Cana Movement founder Mgr. Charles Vella and close aide to Don Verze’ had had successfully lobbied the Nationalist government in starting the construction of a state-funded 400-bed hospital and research centre managed by the Monte Tabor foundation of San Raffaele, offering free of charge specialised health care.

“As soon as I saw with my own eyes the greatness of San Raffaele, I wished that Malta would benefit from this experience.” 
Then ministers John Rizzo Naudi and Louis Galea were also carried away by Dun Charles’s vision and the project took off, amidst great political controversy on the awarding of tenders for the hospital’s construction.

But upon his election as Prime Minister in 1996, Alfred Sant took the decision to part ways with San Raffaele and embark on the building of an even greater 800-bed general hospital. Two years later, upon the re-election of Eddie Fenech Adami in 1998, work on building this general hospital continued and instead of San Raffaele, the overgrown hospital was baptised Mater Dei.

In an interview with MaltaToday in 2005, Dun Charles had expressed his ‘bitterness’ at the decision and squarely blamed Alfred Sant and the “barons” in the medical profession for frustrating his dream. “Alfred Sant informed us on his decision in the most inelegant of ways,” he had said.

He attributes Sant’s decision to discontinue the San Raffaele project to a pre-electoral pact between certain doctors and Alfred Sant in which they agreed to get rid of San Raffaele. “Doctors were afraid of competition. They would have no longer remained the barons in the medical field. They also had financial concerns because doctors in San Raffaele are only allowed to perform private practice within the confines of the hospital instead of roaming in various clinics around the island. They simply did not like our methods.”