The year is ending with the ruling MSM-ML bloc getting frayed at the edges. It’s looking increasingly clear that Ivan Collendavelloo’s ML is on the way out (it would have to be to make way for the MMM). If Collendavelloo thought that swallowing an electoral reform proposal that runs counter to everything he said in the past would translate to the MSM backing him on his pet project to put the CWA under private management, allowing him to at least show something for his time in power, then he has got the short-end of that stick. The electoral reform proposal failed to pass initially and is now turning into a budding MMM-MSM rapprochement at the expense of Collendaveloo. And the MSM doesn’t want to be embarrassed by tinkering with the CWA and so has vetoed Collendavelloo’s project anyways. In short, Collendavelloo made all the concessions and has nothing to show for it at the end of the day. But poor old Collendavelloo has no choice but to stay quiet: he needs the MSM more than the MSM needs him.

This is not to say that all is rosy at the Sun Trust either. The years of misgovernance are starting to take a toll. Just to take one example: the MSM’s agreement to revise the tax treaty with India is looming with the changes kicking in in March 2019. The minister of financial services, Sudhir Sesungkur, is at his wits end. He admits that it will be a “blow” for the financial sector but stops just short of admitting that the government was wrong to acquiesce to the revisions. How could he? He cannot simply admit it was a mistake and then blame it all on Bhadain (as he attempted to do in the case of Britam or the BAI). That would be too obviously ludicrous since there were many others involved: wasn’t it then-Finance Minister Vishnu Lutchmeenaraidoo who was hopping to and from New Delhi negotiating the amendments in 2015? And when Bhadain foolishly put his signature on the amendments in 2016, wasn’t it under the gaze of the financial secretary, Dev Manraj, the prime minister’s right-hand man?  And would nobody ask how it is that the government outsourced the responsibility of re-negotiating a treaty so important to the financial sector to a neo-phyte minister? And then, if Bhadain made a mistake, why did the government not step in and abort the whole affair? And indeed, why did the government attempt to paint it as a “victory” boasting that the Indians were giving a Rs12 billion grant in return? But admitting it was a mistake (whether Bhadain’s or the entire government’s) would also take some of the sheen off the Metro Express project, on which the prime minister has staked so much of his political capital, if it was admitted that it came at the expense of the financial sector.

And so what is poor Sesungkur to do? In 2019, he will have some foreign banks who have specialised in handling the offshore money leave, local banks will see their money from the offshore sector shrivel up, some management companies might close down and there will be the question of what on earth to do with all those accounting graduates that keep getting churned out each year? And so the only thing Sesungkur and the government can do is go hat in hand to the Indians and beg for the deadline for the changes in the tax treaty to be delayed by another couple of years. That way, it’s another minister’s and another government’s problem.

But it would be too much for either ruling party to admit such confessions.

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