The Globe Spotlight Team spent months investigating the unusual partnership between Medical Properties Trust and Steward Health Care to lay bare another critical piece of this saga. 

Among the team’s findings: MPT and Steward, which were supposed to operate at arm’s length, instead often operated in concert. MPT — which in addition to being Steward’s landlord was a creditor and minority owner — quietly routed money to Steward, helping its biggest tenant make rent payments. MPT hid Steward’s ailing financial health from investors, which may have bolstered its bottom line, but may have also violated federal securities laws, according to experts and analysts who spoke to the Globe.

Citing the circular transactions, some observers have likened the entire arrangement to a Ponzi scheme. Read the full investigation.

Ralph de la Torre oversaw Steward’s collapse. Meet the corporate board that OK’d many of his decisions.

The new Steward may not look all that different from the old one. 

Steward’s board of directors, in a step experts in corporate governance call highly unusual, eschewed appointing a successor to Ralph de la Torre, leaving the teetering health system without even an interim CEO or chairman. 

Now, Steward is led by that same board that seems to have offered little or no resistance as Steward’s hospitals were starved of resources and de la Torre got rich on massive dividends.

The board largely rubber-stamped de la Torre’s strategic vision for years and took home six-figure salaries for attending quarterly meetings and several benefited from his extravagant use of company funds, a Globe Spotlight investigation has found. Read the investigation into the group.

Jet travel, yacht adventures, and more. How Steward’s CEO used corporate funds as the company crumbled.

Steward Health Care CEO Ralph de la Torre jetted to Jamaica for an escape last June. Less than two weeks later, he headed off on another break to the Virgin Islands. And then to Antigua. To St. Kitts. To Bermuda. To Turks and Caicos.⁠

Each time, the private jet excursions were paid for by Steward, pulled directly from the coffers of an insolvent company, one of the nation’s largest for-profit, private hospital chains. By the time de la Torre settled back in Dallas that September, unpaid vendors had become so incensed they repossessed vital medical supplies.⁠

It was just one instance of de la Torre and other executives gallivanting across the world while their hospitals fell further and further into distress. ⁠Read the full story.