The Ministry of Financial Services is a very special institution, even as Mauritian institutions go. In its all-too-brief existence since 2015, it has distinguished itself by being the only institution in the country that has the ability to grapple with a complex problem and then leave everybody else more confused than ever before. 

It started off with the collapse of the BAI. After playing a prominent role in juggling accounting firms and the law, the ministry then under Roshi Bhadain crowed that it had helped “save” the country from the clutches of what it deemed to be a “Ponzi-like” scheme that was collapsing under its own weight. That is until Bhadain and the then-finance minister started accusing each other of “orchestrating” the fall of one of the largest conglomerates in the country. No more talk of Ponzis and no more talk of saving. So while everybody else has been scrambling to deal with the fallout of that fiasco, until today, the question has not been settled: was the BAI collapse inevitable, or was it a victim of a political vendetta? 

Then take the BRITAM episode. The current minister, Sudhir Sesungkur, accused his predecessor of underselling the BAI’s shares in Britam Kenya. And a whole commission was established to try and prove that. But then the government’s own people started going there and denying that there were other offers for BRITAM, which left Sesungkur high and dry, so he stopped saying that. But everybody else is still scratching their heads wondering what the whole point of the commission is. 

Or take the New Mauritius Hotels episode. Another former MSM adviser, Kriti Taukoordass (with an axe to grind against Sesungkur as well) was tasked by the FSC to look into share sales in the hotel group. Taukoordass produced a report, the companies he implicated said that they are suing him and the whole episode has been forgotten since then. So was the share sales a rigged game or not? This is an important question that needs an answer especially since the local stock market wants 150,000 people to invest in stocks by 2023. Not an easy thing to do if people think it’s all a rigged game and the Financial Services Ministry and the regulator cannot provide an answer one or another when confronted with such cases. Till today, no one really knows what happened at New Mauritius Hotels. 

Another example? Take the recent ESAAMLG report. Before it was made public, Sesungkur lobbied other African states to block it arguing that was “biased” and “factually incorrect”. But since the report became public, the government and its institutions have scrambled to institute regulations to plug up gaps identified by the ESAAMLG, including a bill to register real estate agents in the works. This begs two questions: if Sesungkur was telling the truth and the report was “biased”, then why is everybody scrambling to enact its recommendations? Or if the report was correct, then why did Sesungkur and the Mauritian government try to suppress it? And were they lying when they were accusing the ESAAMLG of every sin under the sun? 

This way of always trying to act clever indicates that the ministry thinks that managing headlines is more important than managing policy. This is why Sesungkur seized on the word ‘passport’ used by press reports about the OECD blacklisting Mauritius to deny that there was a problem since Mauritius had not actually started selling its passports yet. He knew that the OECD was actually talking about permanent residencies being sold by Mauritius since 2002. But the headline of the day is more important than actually doing any real explaining. And going by the track record of the ministry to date, getting to the nub of things seems to be an ability that Sesungkur and his ministry have yet to learn.  

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