The president of Maldives, Ibrahim Solih, is facing accusations of bribery for his decision to reverse decades of Maldivian foreign policy and formally recognize the Mauritian claim over the Chagos islands. With a decision of the ITLOS over the Mauritius Maldives maritime boundaries expected on Friday and contentious presidential elections to be held in September this year, here is how Maldives’ overheated politics and its divided ruling MDP has given rise to these fresh accusations.

Ibrahim Solih, the president of Maldives, is facing fresh corruption accusations, this time over the decision of his government last year to reverse decades of Maldivian foreign policy and formally recognize Mauritian so- vereignty over the Chagos islands. The accusations of bribery came not from the opposition PPM-PNC combine that is lined up behind ex-president Abdulla Yammen, who Solih replaced in 2018, but from within the ruling Maldivian Democratic Party (MDP) itself.

On Monday, an MDP parliamentarian Ibrahim Rasheed accused Solih of accepting a $500 million bribe from “foreign fishing companies” that were operating in Mauritian waters to recognize the Mauritian claim; the MP added that would allow these companies to now fish in the 95,000-square kilometre zone, currently claimed by both Mauritius and Maldives in their maritime boundary dispute being heard since 2019 at the UN’s International Tribunal of the Law of the Sea (ITLOS), which is expected to give its decision on Friday.

Also, at Monday’s session, the opposition PNC’s Adam Shareef Umar, currently allied with Yameen’s PPM, successfully pushed through a motion – passed by 23 out of 42 MPs in the People’s Majlis – demanding that the Solih government make public a letter sent to Mauritian Prime Minister (PM) Pravind Jugnauth in August last year, announcing the Maldives’ decision to back Mauritius’ sovereignty claim.

On August 22, last year, the Solih government sent an official letter to PM Pravind Jugnauth announcing the change in its policy and switching its vote at the UN General Assembly to back Mauritius. This was announced by the Maldivian Attorney General Ibrahim Riffath at the ITLOS in Hamburg on 20 October: “The Maldives had previously voted against this resolution for reasons which have been explained by the Maldives at the preliminary objections phase… However, as communicated in the president’s letter, the Maldives has decided to vote in favour of the resolution.” The decision came as Maldives found it increasingly hard to maintain its traditional stance of fobbing off Mauritian requests that it recognizes the Chagos islands as Mauritian, arguing that it could not do so until the question of sovereignty was settled between Mauritius and the UK.

This policy came under strain first with the decision of the UN’s International Court of Justice (ICJ) and the UNGA resolution that overwhelmingly backed the Mauritian claim, and then in 2021, when the ITLOS itself dismissed any sovereignty claims that the UK had on the Chagos. Shortly after the Maldives’ change in policy, the UK announced that it was opening talks with Mauritius over the Chagos due to be concluded this year. The Maldivian government has insisted that its decision of recognize the islands as Mauritius is separate from its dispute regarding the boundary between Chagossian and Maldivian waters being heard at the ITLOS.

The fight within the MDP

The fact that the accusations of bribery came from Rasheed within the MDP is an indication of how bitter the fight within the ruling party has become ahead of presidential elections scheduled for September this year. Particularly as Rasheed is widely considered to be associated with ex-president and current speaker in the Majlis, Mohamed Nasheed, who heads an anti-Solih faction within the MDP, and with Rasheed widely considered to be a spokesman for Nasheed, launching attacks on Solih that Nasheed would prefer not to make directly.

Let us take Rasheed’s accusation that the $500 million bribe came from “foreign fishing companies” working in Mauritian waters. This is merely a rehash of previous warnings that Nasheed himself came up with, pointing the finger at such fishing interests. In a statement on November 9, 2022, Nasheed stated that “it is of huge concern that Indian Ocean fish stocks are increasingly depleted because countries are giving fishing rights to factory trawlers and purse seiners. The only zones in the Indian Ocean which are fully protected from industrial fishing are those of the Maldives and the Chagos territory. In the case of Maldives, our fishermen use pole and line one by one fishing techniques with no bycatch and maintained at a sustainable level”. He added that it was to protect such fishing grounds that “it is imperative that the Maldives government not consider relinquishing any territory to parties that would allow purse seining and other destructive industrialised fishing practices”.

Previously close to Nasheed within the MDP, Solih came to power in the 2018 presidential election after he was picked by the party as its candidate. Nasheed, who was then in exile in Sri Lanka and ruled ineligible to run due to now-dropped court cases against him, returned to Maldives after the elections and took up the job of speaker while continuing to run an influential faction within the MDP.

Since 2020, the cracks within the ruling MDP between Solih and Nasheed have only been widening with Nasheed’s and Solih’s supporters trading accusations of corruption against one another: in 2020, Nasheed secured the resignation of Solih’s health minister Abdulla Ameen over allegations of corruption in the procurement of ventilators for Covid-19 patients; then Nasheed managed to derail a $6.7 million project funded by the Asian Development Bank to set up an e-portal to streamline Maldives’ foreign trade after running a campaign alleging corruption that led the ADB to pull funding for the project and accused economic development minister Fayyaz Ismail – and key Solih loyalist who beat out a Solih loyalist to secure the MDP Chairmanship in 2022 – of economic mismanagement, with pro-Nasheed MPs in the Majlis refusing to back Solih’s attempts to raise general and tourism-related sales taxes.

Solih hit back by arresting Nasheed’s brother in a sex scandal – with Nasheed’s supporters circulating their own rumours of sex scandals involving Solih in intraMDP WhatsApp groups – and accusing Nasheed of trying to stage killings of his own MDP supporters as part of his campaign to discredit and dislodge the Gayoom government in 2008. Back in July last year, Nasheed also put Solih in a tight spot after reportedly personally intervening to allow fleeing Sri Lankan President Gotabaya Rajapaksa to land in Maldives before moving on to Singapore. The latest allegations being made by Rasheed on Monday are just the latest in this series of exchanges between Nasheed and Solih.

Back in January this year, both Solih and Nasheed contested a bitter primary within the MDP to become the party’s presidential candidate at the elections in September – the first time a sitting president was challenged in a primary within his own party. Out of the 40,000 MDP members who voted – 71 per cent of its membership –, 61 percent (24,566) backed Solih beating out the 15,641 members who picked Nasheed. The lo- sing side reacted by alleging vote-rigging within the MDP primary, alleging that pro-Nasheed members were being kicked out of the party ahead of the vote to improve Solih’s chances.

Since January, Nasheed has not ruled out standing as president himself against Solih with Nasheed trying to organize a separate movement within the MDP labelled Fikuregge Dhirun (‘reviving an ideology’) and looking to bring 50,000 MDP members under his factional umbrella. In the meantime, Nasheed is also reaching out of Qasim Ibrahim of the Jumhooree (‘Republican’) Party, a key coalition ally of the Solih-led MDP government and who in March announced that he would also be standing as president in September’s polls rather than backing Solih for another term.

The Chagos question

That the ITLOS is scheduled to render its verdict on the maritime boundary dispute between Mauritius and Maldives on Friday has revived attacks on the Solih government. Rasheed, in his allegations of a $500-million bribe, has also reached back to revive statements that were made by Nasheed in 2022 just after Maldives announced his change in policy regarding the sove- reignty question over the Chagos. In the Majlis on Monday, Rasheed reiterated Nasheed’s claim that the Chagos islands originally belonged to Maldives – a dramatic escalation of Maldives’ official position – and the first time that such a claim had emerged from within Maldives.

Back in October, Nasheed had claimed that Maldivian monarchs as early as 1560 had described the part of the Chagos islands as Maldivian territory, an extension of the southern Addu atoll, claiming that Maldivian maps drawn up after 1500 reflected those claims. Nasheed stated that islands in the Chagos group such as Peros Banhos – over which a scientific expedition commissioned by the Mauritian government raised the Mauritian flag in February 2022 – should belong to Maldives.

For its part, the Solih government rubbished these claims pointing out that at no time has the Maldivian state ever laid such a claim over the territory of the Chagos, the dispute with Mauritius is just about where the maritime boundary between the Chagos and Maldives lies, not about ownership of the Chagos islands themselves. Within the Majlis on Monday, Nasheed himself also attempted to raise nationalist ire against Solih by stating that, regardless of the ITLOS verdict on Friday, he did not intend to change his views over the Chagos is- lands and would continue to push for the islands – or at least some of them – to be recognized as Maldivian territory.