Priscilla Muthoora Thakoor defended the BoM Supervision failure.
By Financial Observer
Mauritius aspires to stand alongside Singapore, Hong Kong, and Luxembourg as a world-class International Financial Centre. That ambition rests on one foundation: a central bank that understands what modern banking supervision requires. What Governor Thakoor’s own public statements have confirmed — alongside a cascade of banking scandals — is that this foundation has been fragile for years. To be fair to the Governor, she inherited a broken institution. The structural failure of banking supervision at the BoM did not begin with her appointment. It has been a decade in the making, deepened successively by Deputy Governors Vikramdass Punchoo, Hemlata Sadhna Sewraj-Gopal, and now Ramsamy Chinniah. But inheriting a problem does not excuse defending it — and that is precisely what she has done.
The Governor’s Analogy Is Not Accurate
In a recent press conference, Governor Thakoor responded to criticism of the BoM’s supervisory record not with accountability but with an analogy. There is no real-time supervision, she explained — everything happens after the event; by the time the regulator arrives, the transactions have already taken place. She then compared banking supervision to road traffic enforcement: accidents happen because of reckless drivers, not police failure.
What the Governor described is not a universal truth about supervision. It is an accurate description of how the BoM currently operates — and precisely the model the world abandoned after the 2008 Global Financial Crisis. Before 2008, supervisors operated much as the BoM does today: periodic examinations, backward-looking data reviews, and a general presumption that banks managed their own risks. The GFC changed all of that. Regulators rebuilt from reactive to proactive, from periodic to continuous, from trusting management to challenging it. Basel III, the Financial Stability Board, and every serious jurisdiction constructed supervisory frameworks grounded in real-time data, stress testing, early intervention, and clawback provisions on banker compensation for losses and misconduct. That transformation happened fifteen years ago. It has not reached the Bank of Mauritius.
Modern banking supervision is powered by SupTech — Supervisory Technology — which gives regulators the same data-driven intelligence that technology gives banks. The ECB’s Single Supervisory Mechanism embeds Joint Supervisory Teams permanently inside significant institutions, backed by tools that transform risk detection: Agora centralises all bank prudential data in one place; Delphi reads news feeds, market data, and financial reports simultaneously to flag emerging risks; and Athena uses AI to detect anomalies across supervisory documents. Together, over 3,500 ECB supervisors monitor leverage, liquidity, credit concentration, AML signals, and fraud indicators continuously. Switzerland’s FINMA conducted 108 on-site reviews at Credit Suisse in four years, identifying 382 action points — 113 classified as high or critical risk — and Credit Suisse still collapsed in 2023. Unlike the BoM, FINMA admitted its mistakes publicly and called for more powers. Today, 60 FINMA supervisors permanently monitor UBS alone. The BoM collects data from banks but runs no preventive early warning system, no automated fraud detection, and no prudential risk dashboard. The signals were there across three failed institutions. The tools and institutional will to read them were not.
The consequences are documented. Prateek Gupta — confirmed by the England and Wales High Court as the architect of a USD 500 million fraud against Trafigura — was granted effective control of Silver Bank through his wife’s 75% shareholding in flagrant breach of the Banking Act’s ownership cap. An internal auditor who filed a Suspicious Transaction Report was suspended for doing so. BoM supervisors were on-site throughout. They said nothing. SBM wrote off Rs 14.34 billion in toxic loans over a decade while the supervision team filed its quarterly returns.
A Structural Failure, A Decade Deep
The supervisory culture that enabled these losses was not built overnight. It has been institutionalised across a decade, shaped by three successive Deputy Governors responsible for banking supervision, each of whom deepened the same pathology of deference, political loyalty, and rewarded mediocrity.
In 2026, while leading regulators deploy AI-driven dashboards tracking risks in real time, the BoM’s supervision team still circulates paper files — floor by floor, for sign-off up to the Deputy Governor’s office. There is no early warning system, no real-time transaction monitoring, and no dashboard that flashes red when a beneficial owner’s network begins absorbing a bank’s loan book. What passes for supervision is a compliance calendar of periodic checklists and quarterly return reviews built on spreadsheets — a model unchanged for fifty years. Most directors are trained as auditors and accountants — backward-looking by professional formation, focused on what has already happened rather than what is building. They do not stress-test cross-border exposures, question liquidity risk, or interrogate related-party transactions. These questions were not asked at BanyanTree. Not at SBM for a decade. Not at Silver Bank while billions were siphoned out of the country.
Advancement at the BoM has long flowed not from technical excellence or supervisory instinct, but from deference, political patronage, and an unbroken record of not making waves. Sycophants are promoted. Critical thinkers leave. The institution’s own annual reports confirm that directors and Deputy Governors travel to Basel, Washington, Frankfurt, Mumbai, and London every year, attending BIS meetings and sitting in rooms with the ECB, the Fed, and the RBI — all at public expense. They return, file their reports, and nothing changes. The system that elevated Chinniah — 32 years inside the supervision department that failed — to Second Deputy Governor is the clearest possible statement of what this institution values. Tenure is expertise. Compliance is competence. Proximity to power is merit.
Accountability: Rewarded, Not Required
Punchoo was appointed Second Deputy Governor in December 2014 by the MSM-led government. He was also involved in the BAI / Bramer Bank crisis and scandal. All three of SBM’s catastrophic Dubai-connected losses occurred on his watch: Pabari Group in August 2017; Renish Petrochem FZE in April–June 2018; and NMC Healthcare in December 2019 — Rs 9 billion in write-offs while his supervision team looked the other way. His legacy extends further. Yandraduth Googoolye as Governor, Renganaden Padayachy as First Deputy Governor, and Punchoo as Second Deputy Governor formed the senior leadership team that structured and initiated the transfer of Rs 18 billion from the Special Reserve Fund to the government ahead of the November 2019 elections — setting the template for the Rs 60 billion in money creation that followed in 2020 and permanently compromising the BoM’s institutional independence. Padayachy left the BoM in October 2019 to stand as an MSM candidate and became Finance Minister. Punchoo was asked to step down in February 2020. In September 2025, he was appointed Chairman of SBM Holdings — the very institution whose losses accumulated on his watch. That appointment passed without a single public question.
Gopal served as Second Deputy Governor from March 2020 to November 2024. During her tenure, Silver Bank’s licence was granted under blatantly problematic ownership in November 2021, public funds were injected to mask the bank’s insolvency, and a whistleblower was suspended for raising the alarm. The fraud unfolded over years in plain sight while BoM supervisors were on-site. Gopal has not been asked to account for any of it.
Rama Sithanen — a former Finance Minister with no central banking background — lasted less than a year before resigning amid a nepotism scandal. Governor Thakoor inherited this debris. But she has compounded it by defending the ex-post supervision model in public rather than dismantling it, and by retaining deputies who are either compromised or embody the very culture that must change. Her First Deputy, who previously served as CFO at Forges Tardieu — a metal and engineering company — has never worked in banking, and remains directly linked to the Sithanen nepotism debacle. Her Second Deputy, Chinniah, is the system personified. A Governor of genuine reforming intent would have replaced both on day one.
The Board Problem: Fit and Proper in Name Only
Governor Thakoor has stated that the board and its committees are the first line of defence in banks. That principle raises an immediate question: who approves the fitness and propriety of those board members? The Bank of Mauritius does — and the record of those approvals is itself an indictment.
When Punchoo and Googoolye were removed in March 2020, Sattar Hajee Abdoula was appointed Chairman of SBM Holdings while simultaneously serving as founder and CEO of Grant Thornton Mauritius. Grant Thornton was then appointed by SBM to recover Pabari Group debts — the toxic exposure at the heart of SBM’s losses. The BoM approved his fit and proper and said nothing. The current Prime Minister later described the arrangement as a clear case of conflict of interest: Hajee Abdoula and his entities received Rs 287.2 million from public bodies between 2015 and 2024, including Rs 28 million from SBM itself. He resigned from SBM the day after the November 2024 election results and was arrested in November 2025, provisionally charged with money laundering.
Sharon Ramdenee, a Chartered Accountant with no background in banking, financial markets, or credit risk, has chaired SBM’s Risk Management Committee since 2019 — throughout the years of peak toxic loan write-offs. Both her appointment and Hajee Abdoula’s were signed off during Gopal’s tenure as Second Deputy Governor. A Mauritian press report from August 2020 identified these appointments as reflecting political proximity rather than professional merit. She remains on the board of SBM Bank today, and the BoM has continued to approve her fitness and propriety despite the scale of write-downs and losses on her committee’s watch. This would not be permitted in any serious IFC. If the first line of defence is the board, and the BoM approves the board, then the BoM owns the failure at every level.
What Is at Stake
The failures documented here are not Governor Thakoor’s alone to own. They span a decade of structural negligence, political patronage, and institutionalised mediocrity. But she is the leader now in post, and the choices she makes — on deputies, on culture, on accountability, and on the supervisory model she defends in public — will determine whether this institution finally changes course or continues its managed decline.
Real reform requires rebuilding and restructuring the supervision function at every level: SupTech tools, AI-driven risk monitoring, professionals with genuine IFC expertise recruited on merit, board rotation enforced without exception, and full accountability for those who held supervisory responsibility when the losses occurred — not promotions, chairmanships, and advisory fees. A regulator that arrives after the accident, surveys the wreckage, and reaches for a traffic analogy instead of a reckoning is not protecting Mauritius’s financial future. It is putting it at risk — again.
All figures are drawn from parliamentary statements, Bank of Mauritius annual reports and public notices, published judicial rulings, FINMA official reports, ECB Banking Supervision publications, and verified press sources. This article represents independent commentary and analysis.