Why this urgency ?
Government pretends that it brought these amendments to “clamp tighter controls on the purchase of real estate by foreign nationals” and thus “enable Mauritian households aspiring to home ownership to achieve their goal." They are selling this amendment as a long-due introduction of the necessary controls on foreign home ownership to give more protection to aspiring homeowners in our country and prevent foreign nationals to circumvent our legislation regulating land ownership, to acquire property in Mauritius. That’s surprising, if government is sincere about protecting local home ownership, it should start by putting an end to the Real Estate Schemes (and so-called Smart City projects) which is an abomination decried by independent economists as a speculative and unproductive use of the country’s strategic land assets by selling them to foreigners. Land prices have risen out of reach of most Mauritian households, while our corporates have extracted huge profits on their large property holdings, and government has also benefited from the high property taxes.
Please, take it as part of the traditional partisan interventions in the National Assembly , meant for the gallery and not to be taken seriously.
On a more serious note, we believe that the urgency comes from the pressures of FATF/EU which are closely monitoring the measures taken by the country to mitigate its AML/CFTstrategic deficiencies especially its failure to ensure access to accurate basic and beneficial ownership information by competent authorities in a timely manner. The authorities and local industry players are also actively working overnight towards addressing the deficiencies and restoring the jurisdiction as an international financial centre of sound repute.
Foundations and trusts-structures that make it nearly impossible to identify who currently owns the assets- are typical tax haven vehicles foreigners use to offer a protective tax-free or tax-reduced wrapper around assets, especially via nominees or prête noms. It was expected that we would have to plug the legal loopholes pertaining to the activities of foundations. Thus , sections 4 and 11 of the Foundations Act have been amended so as to align it with the Non-Citizens (Property Restrictions) Act under which authorisation is required from the PMO for a non-citizen to hold, dispose of, purchase or otherwise acquire property in Mauritius. Wouldn’it have been simpler to amend the Foundation Act to provide disclosures of the beneficial ownership which authorities could have access to ?-to be more in line with the FATF.
I do not have any issue on the impact of this amendment as I do not subscribe to the RES type of development model that does not deliver a rising economic tide that could lift all boats but instead polarises the country between the haves and the have-nots and partitions the country into densely-populated ghettoes and luxurious gated-communities.
But I am perplexed; with the many advisers , the EDB, the FS and his team of economists at MOFED, queuing up to advice our PM who keeps on “fauté-ing”, is this the kind of advice that they think will improve our “Ease of Doing Business” (sic) - our Dr Payadachy aspires to place us in the Top 10 by 2026.
Some of our political commentators are already worried about its negative impact on the economy “ By asking property owners to let the prime minister decide who they can sell the property they bought with their own money to, the already thin queues of buyers will vanish overnight. “
And “ qu’ll ne fallait pas foncer téte baissée dans un projet de loi qui a pour ambition de brider davantage des investisseurs étrangers et mauriciens dansun contexte économique ou l'on doit faire repartir le business, et non pas faire partir les hommes d'affaires, dont plusieurs sont déja assommés par la mauvaise publicité autour de nos services financiers et denotre processus d’autocratisation.’
The key institutions of this regime seems to be intent on building up an environment so hostile to talent, discussions and sound advice
