Daiva Repečkaitė, Julian Bonnici and Sabrina Zammit
When patients file a complaint alleging mistreatment by their doctor, it cannot undo the harm, but it can offer a pathway to justice. In Malta, however, some of these complaints have remained under investigation for over a decade.
No doctor in Malta has had their licence revoked or suspended for malpractice since 2010, despite allegations.
This can have repercussions. An unprecedented international investigation led by OCCRP, VG in Norway, and The Times in the UK, exposes how doctors who have lost their medical licenses due to major wrongdoing, including patient harm, can easily relocate and practise in different countries. Amphora Media was the Maltese partner in this investigation.
Reporters gathered more than 2.5 million records, which OCCRP’s data team built into a database to help trace banned doctors practising in a different country.
The team found at least three doctors who have lost their licences to practice abroad but are currently licensed practitioners in Malta, according to the latest register published by Malta’s Medical Council.
Malta is also one of four EU countries, together with Estonia, Greece and Liechtenstein , that sent no alerts to the EU’s Internal Market Information System (IMI) about any doctor between 2016 and 2025.
“It is very worrying to discover that, although we have a European alert mechanism for serious cases in the healthcare system, it is full of loopholes and is used inconsistently,” Nicolae Ștefănuță, vice president of EU Parliament, told OCCRP’s Romanian partner Public Record.
“I call on Member States to treat these alerts with the utmost responsibility and not to let serious cases go unpunished,” he added.
This is not due to a lack of patient complaints. The Medical Council’s latest annual report lists complaints that were filed as early as 2013 but have not been deliberated upon. At the time the 2024 annual report was filed:
- The board of inquiry was still to start working on a case where a patient`s mother alleged unethical and unprofessional behaviour by a medical practitioner towards her daughter during treatment back in 2013.
- A complaint about “unsafe medical practice to the community,” filed in 2017, was still pending at the committee level.
- In 2018, a complaint reached the Medical Council about an unlicensed practitioner issuing medical reports, but the case was still being “discussed”.
- A patient filed an allegation of sexual abuse in 2020, but the Medical Council had failed to initiate a board of inquiry.
Neither the Medical Council nor the Ministry of Health and Active Ageing’s spokesperson replied to Amphora’s request for comment about these doctors.
The Medical Council did not explain why investigations were taking so long. The spokesperson for the health ministry also ignored Amphora Media’s questions about the adequacy of the Medical Council’s procedures in investigating these cases.
When in trouble, change countries
OCCRP and its partners confirmed that over 100 doctors who are currently banned or suspended from practising medicine in one or more jurisdictions for a range of serious reasons – including cases of sexual assaults during their medical work, botched medical treatments and inserting breast implants without consent – are licensed to practice elsewhere. Some of them relocated to a country where they already had a license after being banned, while others managed to obtain new licenses.
By calling their new workplaces, making online appointments or visiting their practices in person, reporters confirmed that the majority of those doctors were not only still licensed, but actively practising medicine.
“The fact that someone who has negatively impacted so many lives with their behaviour when they were in a position of care over those people, and myself being one of them, has then been allowed to keep practising and potentially harm more people is abhorrent,” said John, a British patient who spoke to reporters about a traumatic experience of unnecessary invasive procedures in the care of doctor Iuliu Stan, whose licence in the UK has been revoked but who is now practising in Romania. John requested his name to be changed.
“It makes it feel like the people in charge don’t care and that they think nothing of the people that have already been his victims,” John added.
Lawyer Tom Fletcher of Irwin Mitchell law firm, a specialist in abuse cases, is representing John and Stan’s other victims. Fletcher said that if a doctor had been struck off in one jurisdiction for sexual abuse, they should not be able to work as a doctor in another country. He said the experience has discouraged victims from seeking medical help when they need it.
Read more about British cases in the story by our partner, The Times
The investigation reveals that most countries did not publish data on doctors who had their licences suspended or revoked. This means that patients and reporters cannot easily see which doctors ever faced disciplinary action.
Only seven countries made data on inactive, banned or suspended doctors available to the public. Reporters filed dozens of freedom of information requests, but only nine were successful.
The price of this secrecy is high. Among the examples uncovered by reporters was the case of Bernhard Scheja, a German doctor who was given a lifetime professional ban in Switzerland in 2023 for sexually assaulting an 18-year-old female patient, leaving the victim “severely traumatised”, the court found. He was given a suspended sentence of 22 months in prison for indecent assault in 2020, which was reduced on appeal. Scheja works at a private medical centre in Germany. He did not respond to requests for comment.
EU’s notification system underused
There is an information exchange system that covers the 30 countries of the European Union and the wider European Economic Area, which could alert authorities about suspended or banned doctors.
Member states are required to file alerts about suspensions and bans on qualified professionals in their own jurisdictions to that online tool, which is called the Internal Market Information System (IMI) and is designed for collaboration between national authorities to protect public health and safety. But when reporters requested the alert history for doctors, they found that some countries had rarely or never sent one.
Malta is one of them. Together with Estonia, Greece and Lichtenstein it sent no IMI alerts about any doctor between 2016 and 2025.
A closer look reveals that there was nothing to alert others about: no medical licence has been revoked in Malta during that period.
Even in cases in which reporters were able to verify that an alert had been sent about a ban on a doctor in one country, either via the IMI or another route, it did not necessarily lead to action by the doctor’s current jurisdiction. Member states are not obliged to consult the IMI alert system before approving a doctor’s qualifications, and have differing revocation standards.
“If a doctor loses their licence for abuse or for otherwise putting patients at risk, then they will be just as dangerous in another country,” Sjur Lehmann, who used to work as a doctor and is now head of Norway’s board of health supervision, told reporters. “The system we have today is better than no system at all, but there are clearly sides to it that can – and should – be further developed and improved.”
A report last year by the European Court of Auditors found that national authorities were “overwhelmed by alerts” through the IMI and did not check them when reviewing applications for recognition of professional qualifications, nor was it mandatory for them to do so.
The European Commission said that it was “monitoring the situation concerning the fulfilment of the obligation by member states to send alerts via IMI” and that it may start infringement procedures if there is evidence that states are not fulfilling their obligations. It confirmed that infringement proceedings are currently in place against Greece.