THE MAURITIUS PAPERS

Inside the Republic’s System of State Capture
By Vayu Putra | The State of the Mind

Independence Without Emancipation

In 1968, when the Union Jack descended in Port Louis, the ceremony promised emancipation. What followed was closer to a handover. The commanding heights of the economy—sugar estates, port concessions, trade channels—remained in the hands of a narrow elite, largely Franco-Mauritian, while a political class emerged to arbitrate access to that wealth. The constitutional machinery imported from Westminster was celebrated for its civility, yet designed with a singular vulnerability: extraordinary concentration of executive appointment powers in the prime ministerial office, with few hard guardrails on conflicts of interest. Sovereignty changed flags; the economic architecture, less so.

Over the subsequent half-century, the pattern has been durable. Public assets were disposed of below value, government contracts ran consistently over price, and state lands were rezoned or alienated in ways that transferred value from public to private balance sheets. Reasonable estimates—triangulating Auditor-General findings, historical GDP, sector leakages and land revaluations—suggest that between 1968 and 2025, Rs 700 billion to Rs 1 trillion in public value (USD 15–20 billion in today’s money) migrated into private hands, much of it ultimately parked offshore. The sums matter, but the method matters more: the system has been highly legal, procedurally tidy, and institutionally choreographed.

I. Capture by Design: The Appointment State

Mauritius’s polity is tidy on paper: a parliamentary republic with a President, a Prime Minister, and a judiciary nominally insulated from the day-to-day. In practice, the architecture places unusual leverage in one locus. Prime ministers advise the President on virtually all major appointments. The President, constitutionally obliged to act on that advice, appoints the Police Commissioner, the Financial Crimes Commission (FCC) Director, the heads of regulatory agencies from the Gambling Regulatory Authority to the Financial Services Commission, and—through complex influence chains—the governing boards of parastatals and the central bank’s leadership. Independence exists in charters; dependence is baked into appointments.

This design has two systemic consequences. First, regulators tend to be formally independent yet practically pliant. Second, oversight migrates with elections. When governments turn over, so do boards, directors, and investigative priorities, with only selective continuity on files that touch politically powerful actors. This is not an episodic failure of nerve; it is a recurring feature of what scholars of governance call the “appointment state,” where discretion over people yields discretion over outcomes.

II. Lawfare as Operating System: The Provisional Charge

The most efficient instrument of control is not censorship or police violence. It is time. Mauritius’s “provisional charge” mechanism allows investigators to arrest, file holding charges, and then allow cases to drift while “inquiries continue.” The International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR), which Mauritius ratified in 1973, requires trial within a reasonable time or release. In practice, low-income defendants often languish for months or years; alleged procedural defects, missing files, and scheduling inertia make the experience itself the punishment. Meanwhile, well-connected suspects are routinely afforded speed: special weekend bail hearings, fast-tracked interlocutory relief, and a choreography of adjournments calibrated to political calendars.

This two-tier chronology—slow for the poor, agile for the powerful—does not rely on overt illegality. It relies on discretion. Lawyers who know the regime is incompatible with international standards rarely mount constitutional challenges on behalf of indigent clients. They reserve those instruments for the eminent. The result is a juridical market in which liberty is a function of liquidity and proximity. The law’s most formidable weapon is not the sentence; it is the docket.

III. The Legal Class: Revolving Doors and Quiet Power

Names recur across decades of politically sensitive litigation. Senior counsel such as Yusuf Mohamed and Raouf Gulbul—widely known for their presence in high-profile matters, with Gulbul also known domestically as the husband of the Chief Justice—feature repeatedly. Kevin Luckeeram, once part of Gavin Glover’s chambers and counsel to Navin Ramgoolam in the Rs 220 million cash case, now sits in Parliament. The Attorney-General’s office has at times been occupied by figures who previously represented principals in marquee investigations; the DPP’s office has seen senior lawyers move from State advising into prosecutorial leadership, generating a perception of closeness that is difficult to dispel even when conduct remains lawful.

The phenomenon is not uniquely Mauritian. But in a small jurisdiction with dense professional ties, the overlap between bar, bench and cabinet produces a structural intimacy that complicates impartiality. Lifestyle audits are rare; disciplinary transparency at the Bar Council is scant; conflicts are often managed by recusal rather than by building systems that diminish the need for recusal. This is less conspiracy than sociology: elites sharing the same schools, chambers, and clubs inevitably share the same cases.

IV. Hot Case, Old Pattern: The Reward-Money Scandal

The “Reward Money” affair is instructive because it lifts the lid on the machine. According to case files and statements reviewed for this dossier, the FCC alleges that reward disbursements—funds meant to incentivise informants and officers—were repeatedly routed through personal accounts and intermediaries, with weak documentation and implausible operational justifications. Assistant Commissioner of Police Dunraz Gangadin’s personal account allegedly saw Rs 160.3 million in flows linked to the Reward Money Fund between 2023 and 2024; cheques totaling Rs 76.8 million were allegedly issued to Sergeant Yeshdeo Seeboruth, who did not command the units credited with the “operations.” The FCC has arrested several officers in this connection; Gangadin was granted bail on strict conditions.

Superintendent of Police Ashik Jagai, the former head of the now-defunct Special Striking Team (SST), was in mid-August ordered to remain in custody pending further questioning on alleged excess claims—Rs 62.7 million between August 2022 and February 2024, plus about Rs 17 million between April and September 2024. Jagai has denied personal enrichment, arguing that his role was administrative: transmitting requests up the chain for assessment by higher headquarters. Other arrests include ACP Lilram Deal (alleged illicit receipt of Rs 4.5 million), ASP Faraaz Mooniaruth and Sergeant Yeshdeo Seeboruth (claims totaling roughly Rs 3 million), and Sergeant Yusuf Ali Hamud Hossen, known as “Hossen Mose” (alleged Rs 83 million into a personal account). The FCC’s case theory, as described by investigators, is not that the scheme was sloppy; it is that sloppiness was the cover.

The scandal’s significance goes beyond police finance. It demonstrates how a legitimate public-policy mechanism—a discretionary reward pot shielded by confidentiality—can be repurposed as a laundering channel. It also reveals the asymmetry of pre-trial liberty. Jagai remains detained pending inquiry; Gangadin, facing larger alleged sums, was released on bail. In an appointment state, the letter of the law competes with the geometry of influence.