Would MCB’s own asset-management arm not also gain from a new funded pension system?
By J Banker
Behind the headline measures of Budget 2026–27 lies one pattern: the people shaping policy that moves billions are too often those who profit when it moves their way — and no one is made to say so. This is not ambition. It is conflicted insiders writing rules that pay them, while ordinary Mauritians foot the bill.
Take the one digital-finance measure actually enacted. Section 64 writes MINDEX and its clearing arm into the Securities Act by name — one private company handed the national exchange and clearing mandate in primary law. Nowhere in the securities law of any credible jurisdiction — the United States, the UAE, Europe, Singapore, Switzerland — is a private exchange named in the statute. Not one. A monopoly granted with no tender is not regulation; it is favouritism, and it lays bare the incompetence of our policymakers and of a financial-services ministry in disarray. The chosen firm is no heavyweight either: barely USD 50 million traded in a year, yet its clearing arm is handed the systemic role — the guarantor that every trade settles — a job that demands the deep liquidity, strong sponsors and balance sheet it plainly lacks.
The pension reform is the same hand at work, and here the cost lands on real people. The committee that designed the new State Age Pension and its means test — disclosed in Parliament by Minister Ashok Subron, not by the government — was stacked with actuaries and insurers whose firms profit from precisely this shift. Read the design: the means test counts salaries, occupational pensions, business income and rent — the income of ordinary Mauritians — yet expressly exempts dividends and interest. So, a retired teacher with a modest second pension is clawed back, while a rentier living off Rs 9 million in dividends keeps his in full. The drafters shielded their own kind of income and squeezed everyone else’s.
No one embodies this better than the Prime Minister’s own Chief Economic Adviser, Gilbert Gnany — until 2024 MCB’s chief economist, and present through both the 2025 pension-age increase that ignited public fury and this year’s redesign. He holds a substantial MCB stake — reported at around 381,000 shares, worth roughly Rs 156 million and paying about Rs 9 million a year in dividends — never divested, the conflict simply waved away. An adviser whose wealth tracks one bank’s fortunes while shaping the ratings, regulation and pension rules that touch it: the conflict could not be plainer. Would MCB’s own asset-management arm not also gain from a new funded pension system?
Asked in Parliament whether any of this had been screened, the Prime Minister — who is also Minister of Finance — shrugged that in a small country everybody has a conflict of interest. That is not a defence; it is a confession. Everywhere serious, “everybody has a conflict” is where disclosure begins, not where scrutiny ends; from the man who controls the Budget, it means conflicts will simply not be managed, and that capture is now policy. We have watched this “dream team” approach implode before: the trio the Prime Minister installed at the Bank of Mauritius collapsed within months, its Governor forced to step aside amid a nepotism scandal over his son’s alleged interference in bank licensing and recruitment.
So let it be said plainly. It is time the celebrated brain of the government’s economic “dream team” did the one thing his brilliance has so far avoided — declare his interests and divest, or step aside. Strike MINDEX from the Act; award any exchange or clearing mandate by open, competitive tender; publish who advised, and what they own. A real financial centre runs on rules that bind everyone equally. What Mauritius has built instead is a machine in which insiders write the rules that pay them — and send the bill to everyone else.