By Their Fruits you will Know Them

11^th May 2007

The Malta Independent - Friday Wisdom

According to the Gospel of St Matthew, Chapter 7 verses 16-20, Our Lord had said:

“You will know them by their fruits. Do men gather grapes from the bushes or figs from the thistles? Even so, every good tree bears good fruit, but a bad tree bears bad fruit. Every tree that does not bear good fruit is cut down and thrown in the fire. Therefore by their fruits you will know them.”

These are profound statements which capture basic truths with emphatic simplicity. You can tell a tree by its fruits, not by its leaves, branches or trunk. And so it is in real life, in so many other, perhaps more complicated, matters.

I was reminded of this week when Dr Frank Portelli, owner and operator of a private hospital, with strong affiliations to the Nationalist Party in government, openly criticised the government for the excessive costs incurred in the Mater Dei hospital. He compared the cost of a similarly sized hospital recently built in the UK, which roughly came to half the total investment being accumulated in our Mater Dei Hospital and surmised that the only logical conclusion is that a lot of commissions must have been paid, which exploded the costs beyond anything within the bounds of reason.

This argument is not new to my readers. My contributions Auditing the Auditor (Friday Wisdom 16 February 2007) and It’s not a gift at all (Friday Wisdom 27 January 2006) had carried pretty much the same arguments and no satisfactory explanations were forthcoming from any official quarters. Dr Portelli went further than me, because I had not dared call a spade by its name, and attributed the excessive costs in generic terms to bad planning and inefficient execution.

Parliamentary Secretary Tonio Fenech, responsible for the finance portfolio in the Office of the Prime Minister and with particular responsibility for budgetary correctness in the execution of the Mater Dei project, lightly waved away Dr Portelli’s allegations explaining them as being empty claims without any proof whatsoever.

In the absence of valid explanations for the excessive costs compared to any value for money benchmark, the onus of proof reverses. Should we be expected to provide receipts, telephone tapes or other hard evidence as to who paid what to whom? Or is it not the government’s responsibility, once there is smoke (in the form of excessive costs compared to all value of money benchmarks), it has a duty to prove to us that there is no fire and that all has been spent with fair compliance to international standards of good financial housekeeping?

Dr Portelli and I had our differences in the past and he is one of two people I had to file libel against in my extensive public career. Let’s just say we don’t break bread together. And I do register that as owner of a private hospital, Dr Portelli may have a vested interested in criticising public health services.

On the other hand being an insider in the health sector he has better access than most regarding what such a hospital should cost and he quoted chapter and verse the costs of a similar benchmark hospital in UK. He has not provided hard evidence of commission sleaze but he has surely provided evidence of the lack of value for money in the grossly inflated investments being made in Mater Dei.

Rather than wave away such sleaze claims as unfounded, the government should call in the National Audit Office and open its books to them to perform a thorough value for money audit. And if the Audit Office considers such a task beyond its capabilities or resources, they should bring in impartial experts from overseas to help them out with carrying this job effectively, without fear or favour.

You can tell a tree by its fruit. If the cost of Mater Dei has cost double (at least) what it should have then it is clear that the fruit is bad and the tree is bad. We don’t have to prove it. The government, as the executor responsible for such project has to disprove it. In this case the onus of proof reverts. Otherwise the Gospel is clear about what fate should await bad trees.