With Raouf Gulbul, Roubina Jadoo-Jaunbocus and the drug business thriving in our prisons thanks to the kind help of some lawyers making the headlines recently, a very serious event seems to have slipped under the radar. The end of the collaboration of Rotterdam court in the Boskalis case involving Siddick Chady and Prakash Maunthrooa, senior adviser in the Prime Minister’s Office. We had warned back in June 2016 that this may turn out to be the biggest single case which will tarnish our international image, hurt the international legal relations we have with other countries and make a mockery of our justice. Today, we wish we were wrong.

There is little ambiguity in the Boskalis case: Two Dutch cadres, Antonious Theodorous de Goёde and Jan Cornelis Haak, admitted to having paid bribes of Rs3 million to Chady and Maunthrooa, in exchange for a juicy contract in the port. At the time, Maunthrooa was acting as an adviser to Boskalis and Chady was the chairman of the Mauritius Ports Authority (MPA).

The two witnesses have already been charged with corruption in their country in the same case! Let that sink in!

They agreed to testify via video-conferencing – something which should have been straightforward in a cyber-island where grandmothers in Quatre Cocos, Souillac and Le Morne happily Skype with their grandchildren in Dublin, Moscow and Timbuktu. Well, it wasn’t!

Two things conspired to make the case one of the longest running cases in the history of Mauritius. First, a bunch of lawyers accused by the prosecution of having raised as many trivial objections as possible and used as many dilatory tactics as they could. They wanted more time, Your Honour, and a bit more time to cross-examine the witnesses. When there were no more possible objections to raise and no more time to grant them, telecoms chipped in to help by contracting a terrible disease – unnamed and unknown so far: Every time the witnesses were supposed to give their testimony, the lines went down and it was impossible to establish a visual connection! This disease became chronic and the Dutch witnesses had to leave everything behind and report to court no less than 15 (FIFTEEN) times to testify in one single case.

The Boskalis case consumed 88 hours of court time! Eighty-eight! By then, the Rotterdam court must have got the message and it communicated to the Mauritian authorities its decision that it no longer wished to collaborate with them because “it was putting a disproportionate strain on the Rotterdam court”. And a strong case became so weak that the protagonists and their lawyers started smelling champagne! So, while the people who admitted having given a bribe to Mauritians have been prosecuted in their country, no one seems to have received that bribe in our Paradise Island – the island where corruption has magically been eradicated.

Pravind Jugnauth, prime minister, had up until now, been on the back foot every time the question came up in parliament about why someone implicated in a corruption case was sitting at the PMO and on so many boards and holding a diplomatic passport. Before long, he will be able to proudly say that no court has convicted his adviser.

So the two men who are on their way to escaping conviction will soon be able to spot a microphone and a camera and burst into tears. When they regain their composure, they will thank the prime minister – and he really deserves all their thanks – the PMO, friends and relatives and everyone who ‘believed in us’. After another outburst of tears, they will thank God that ‘the truth has triumphed’. This kind of truth always triumphs in Paradise. Ask the former attorney general.

Sorry Rotterdam! You gave us 88 hours of your time. We still failed to give our people justice. But thanks for trying.

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