Developer Sandro Chetcuti yesterday registered a significant success in court when the Attorney General dropped the attempted murder he was facing in relation to business leader Vince Farrugia.

I told him I had no doubt he had rib fractures and that is when we spoke about a bone scan

Instead, Mr Chetcuti, 38, a former member of the Chamber of Small and Medium Enterprises – GRTU, now stands charged with attempting to inflict grievous bodily harm on Mr Farrugia, the chamber’s director general, at his office in Valletta in March 2010.

The amendment to Mr Chetcuti’s charge sheet came at the end of a sitting during which Mr Farrugia’s daughter, a medical consultant, testified.

Marie-Klaire Farrugia, a consultant paediatric surgeon based at Chelsea and Westminster Hospital in the UK, said she was her dad’s medical consultant and gave him medical advice whenever he asked for it.

She said her father called her from hospital on the day of the incident and she caught a flight to Malta a few days later.

By the time she got here, he had been discharged from hospital and was recovering at home. She said he was breathless and had a localised tenderness on the chest.

“I was concerned he had abdominal or splenic injuries but after he told me he had had an ultrasound done at Mater Dei Hospital, I excluded this from possible explanations,” she told Magistrate Edwina Grima.

She said due to his symptoms, she had a suspicion that he might have a rib injury that could have been missed by hospital tests and told him the only way to get this checked was through a bone scan.

She denied referring him to any consultant to have a bone scan done and neither did she send her father to consultant radiologist Anthony Samuel to have it done.

Dr Samuel’s medical examination raised eyebrows in court during previous sittings as his report conflicted with the medical examinations of court-appointed pathologist Mario Scerri.

The court even appointed a third consultant, radiologist Malcolm Crockford, to examine the conflicting medical reports.

Dr Scerri had told the court he disagreed with what Dr Samuel had said in his report and insisted Mr Farrugia had not suffered any fractures in the incident. Dr Crockford then confirmed this version and said the X-rays showed no visible fractures.

During previous sittings, the defence questioned Dr Samuel’s integrity because of his alleged strong ties with the Farrugia family.

Defence lawyer Manwel Mallia continued with this line of defence yesterday, repeatedly questioning Dr Farrugia about whether she had contacted Dr Samuel about her father.

Dr Farrugia denied but later admitted having bumped into Dr Samuel, whom she had known for some 15 years, at a bar in Sliema where they briefly discussed her father’s injuries. That was when the bone scan idea was floated.

“I told him I had no doubt he had rib fractures and that is when we spoke about a bone scan. I did not ask him to do it,” she said. In a previous sitting, Dr Samuel admitted to having dated Dr Farrugia in the past.

The defence alleged there were five SMSs from her UK mobile number to Dr Samuel but she could not recall any of them.

In an SMS she had allegedly sent her father on the night of the incident, Dr Farrugia had written: “Hi pa, I just asked Anthony Samuel to do a special scan on your ribs to check if there’s a fracture (no difference in terms of treatment, but helps court case). He will contact you through Jean Karl (her brother).”

She could not recall this either but insisted she happened to meet him in a bar, socially.

The case continues in June.