Another Mari Deal?
By Paramanund Soobarah
And the Medpoint Clinic at the centre of it! This clinic is surely fated to go down in our history as a monument to actions of the powerful, as the Chateau du Réduit did. (It was built by a Governor for him to be closer to his mistress in Moka, as he considered that his official residence Chateau de Mon Plaisir at Pamplemousses was too far away for his purposes; he nearly drove the colony bankrupt in the process.) The Medpoint Clinic gave us the Medpoint Agreement, which in turn gave us the power sharing agreement “à l’israelienne” and the Presidential powers “à l’indienne” thereby demolishing those very constitutional powers that, way back in 1983, saved Prime Minister Anerood Jugnauth when he was being forced out of office by his erstwhile ‘friends’.
The government spawned by the power sharing agreement gave us the famous ‘Illovo Deal’ – a real “Mari Deal”, as it was dubbed by its progenitor. Its legal intricacies were so advanced that the progenitor had to go to outside consultants to seek cover for it. But what goes round comes round. Now the progenitor of that deal has himself found the latest Medpoint deal to be the “scandale du siècle”!
We saw nothing in the electoral programme of the “Alliance de l’Avenir” about building or acquiring new hospital accommodation in the country. We have not seen any public expressions of need for a clinic, but given the shortage of accommodation that the provision of free health service generates in this country a case for it can always be made retrospectively.
No transaction becomes “transparent” merely by being called so. We hope that the Director of Audit will look into this matter and do his duty with the same zeal that his counterparts in India, Canada, the US and other self-respecting democracies do.
* Published in print edition on 28 January 2011
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