The one percent took US$ 17.54 billion in 15 years. Here's the math.
Siyaasee-igthisaadhu kathilun: a financial accounting of the ruling class.
Artwork: Dosain
3 hours ago
What if I said the Maldives has the circulating financial capacity to provide free housing, staple food ingredients, water, fuel, electricity, public transport, vital healthcare, internet, and communications services to all households in the country every year and still have over US$ 111.46 million (MVR 1.72 billion) left as a surplus? What if I told you that we could overturn our national debt crisis within a little over three years?
According to my estimates based on official datasets, our economic one percent – the resort elites, salaried-politician class, and their foreign capitalist allies – stole US$ 17.54 billion (MVR 270.5 billion) in the last 15 years. Even this is a charitable estimate, not including the billions stolen during former President Maumoon Abdul Gayoom’s regime and prior. In other words, in the last 15 years, that’s approximately:
US$ 5.85 billion (MVR 90.21 billion) every presidential term
US$ 1.17 billion (MVR 18.04 billion) every year
US$ 97.46 million (MVR 1.502 billion) every month
US$ 3.20 million (MVR 49.34 million) every day
US$ 133,136 (MVR 2.051 million) every hour
US$ 2,218.93 (MVR 34,215.9) every minute
US$ 36.98 (MVR 570.23) every second
That’s more than the highest monthly minimum wage salary about every 14 seconds, an entire annual minimum wage salary earnings in almost three minutes, and more money than you will ever make in 50 years in just almost three hours. I’ll explain how I got those numbers.
If you think this sounds hyperbolic, ignorant, or suspicious: good. Hold onto that. Doubt, questioning, and self investigation are important when determining what’s true, especially in a modern age where we’ve grown accustomed to letting people (and now, inaccurate chatbots) tell us what the truth is. Use that doubt as motivation to verify things yourself. Don’t just take my word for it, and don’t just let me or anyone else tell you what to think about data either.
It doesn’t matter what political beliefs you have, how much you know about economics, what party you support, what faction leader you favour, or how you think our resources and people should be governed. Let’s leave these things aside for now. Here’s what I want you to focus on:
1-
The resources we have as a nation, including land and lagoons, and their value
2-
What draws in wealth, from where, and how much
3-
Whose hands a and b are concentrated into and what they’re doing with it
4-
How much is publicly known about a, b, and c, and whether it’s legitimate
5-
The opportunity costs: what’s being sacrificed
Whether you think it’s justified or not is a matter of morality. The main objective of this open data compendium is for you to take initiative to confirm the data for yourself with your own eyes and determine whether my analysis makes sense with your own mind, even if it’s to prove me wrong.
Waste vector one: free hand-outs to politicians
First, given how horrible and difficult conditions were for average people across decades – and just how incompetent our politicians have been for over a century – we must ask exactly how much we’ve paid to maintain state capitalism.
Here are some takeaways from a public expenditure review for Maldives by the World Bank (2022) before diving into the figures:
Around a third of the government budget and two fifths of government revenue on average was spent on the wage bill, though this is normal for Small Island Developing States (SIDS)
Compared to other SIDS, however, Maldives’ wage bill had grown faster than the economy, and was higher than most other upper-middle income and SIDS countries
While public sector employees made 40 percent more than private sector employees on an average and allowances made nearly half of the total take-home pay, these allowances were unevenly distributed even across the same job roles and were doubled for police/military personnel and politicians. Despite this, they only work 30 hours a week, far lower than international standards.
About 15.68 percent of the staff received a total compensation much higher than the remaining workers who receive an average allowance of MVR 8,479 in the MVR 0-10,000 basic salary bracket
Bear this in mind as you read.
Firstly, I will compare the government wage bill to total government revenue. On a 15-year average, wages for government staff took up 40.28 percent of government revenue, and 30.55 percent of government expenditure.
Secondly, let’s look at debt and deficits. You should note that government debts and deficits are actually quite normal in developing economies – they’re a sign of investment into infrastructure and other public service activities – however, that holds true only as long as the economy’s total production (i.e., GDP) outpaces our annual debt and deficit.
Maldives’ debt-to-GDP ratio was already increasing due to our corrupt systems of wealth distribution, but it remained manageable only because the economy hadn’t suffered a financial shock. As you can see in Figure 2, when the pandemic hit our economy with a financial shock, our government debt soared far above the value of the country’s entire annual production output and our government budget deficit remained higher than ever.
If you look at the Debt-to-GDP moving average trendline, we can project rising government debt over time in a fashion similar to 2010-2019 since the factors for these conditions like financial mismanagement and corruption are worsening and remain unsolved. We will not survive another financial shock at this rate.
Despite our high debt-to-GDP ratio, our payouts to government staff kept increasing (from US$ 589.3 million in 2020 to US$ 814.07 in 2025), on an average being almost double the amount of our budget deficit annually, going far off world bank’s expenditure recommendations in 2022.
The table above includes the approximate total figures for all the basic salaries in specified offices as per right to information data from Project Zinmaadhaaru as well as the allowance-inclusive salary budget for the People’s Majlis.
You would notice that the estimated annual total not only remained the same (see World Bank), but also, if we factor in the allowances, the real total would be double or more today given the unrestricted increases in government wages, salaries, and allowances over time.
From 2010 to 2025, the nation has spent US$ 9.29 billion on government wages. Assuming a generous margin of 15% for politicians, parliament members, and political appointees, we can say US$ 1.39 billion was wasted over 15 years maintaining state capitalists who do nothing on taxpayer payroll but steal from the treasury, sell off our islands for personal profits, play harmful power games, and waste our time.
Waste vector two: tourism industry elites and their lion’s share of profits
The tourism industry is by far our largest GDP component and government revenue source. As a country that imports about 90 percent of its food and all of its energy and essential resources, the nation’s most critical source of income and where that wealth is distributed should matter to us urgently. This information is gathered from the annual tourism ministry yearbooks for 2014, 2016, 2019, and 2024.
On an average, 85.47 percent of all tourism revenue is concentrated into private hands. What the public makes are scraps and crumbs compared to the profit outflows into the hands of the elite one percent.
As the number of resorts increased over time, full foreign ownership of resorts went from 37.8 percent to 53.71 percent, whereas full local ownership of resorts declined from 43.9 percent to 26.29 percent. From 2017 onwards, the tourism ministry stopped recording details of resort ownership in their annual reports, so I manually cross-searched each registered resort on the Maldives business portal registry and categorised the data for 2025. The full details are in Table 3A of the dataset.
In total, resorts garnered about US$ 51.056 billion in revenue over a 15 year timeframe. After deducting operating costs, money reinvested into the local economy by local private owners, and retained profits for contingencies and future operations, the estimated excess lost into private hands and/or siphoned into foreign profits are around US$ 12.898 billion in 15 years.
Unfortunately, we can only make educated estimates when it comes to resorts, because they are not required to publicly disclose their quarterly and annual income statements, hardly ever externally audited, and often in league with the bureaucrat capitalists. Rents to the landowners is a cost vector I haven’t included because even this money counts as wealth lost to part of the private one percent (i.e., landlords).
Waste vector three: the landlord aristocracy
The next major component in financial handouts to the elite one percent is rent. I have specifically focused on Malé, because this is where about 41 percent of the population lives, according to the 2022 census, and the greatest share of rental households in the republic is in Malé. Almost half of the people in Malé, the industrial capital that people are forced to migrate to for necessities, do not actually own the places they live in, and the greatest share of their expenditures – about 27 percent (HIES 2019) – is spent on rent.
Here, I have calculated estimated sequential projections and averages for Malé city’s rental households, household characteristics, and average rent using intercensal data and other sector-wide surveys. The officially recorded information that’s available is highlighted in green. You’ll find the sources and formulas in Table 6A of the dataset.
In all, Malé city alone should’ve generated an estimated rental revenue of US$ 3.22 billion in the last 15 years. As a measure of gauging accuracy, I’ve compared it to every year’s respective total GDP as well as real estate GDP.
A consistent average 51.97 percent share of real estate activity GDP and an average of 4.26 percent of total GDP adds up with demographic and household trends over time. Furthermore, the eventual decrease in the share of real estate activity value over the last 15 years is also consistent.
Much of national real-estate activities would be concentrated in the Greater Malé Area after all, with the city being the only comprehensively equipped centralised urban center in the country. As home ownership increased and rental households decreased over time, so did its share in real estate GDP. In other areas, real estate activities would mainly consist of land sales, lease activities, and tourism-related activities. Only eight percent of households through 2014 and 2022 were rentals in atolls, so even as far as construction, land trade, and other such activities are concerned, the share would be low.
As with the financial statements of resorts, there are no publicly available rental income audits, especially for property owners with large shares of real estate or even corporations dedicated to property trade. As such, I’ve only used a 30 percent cost margin – to include insurance premiums, loan interest premiums if applicable, maintenance and repairs, and administrative staffing, for example – and estimated the remainder as a profit, but feel free to adjust those margins in your own calculations.
In all, over a 15 year timeframe, that is US$ 2.188 billion in Malé city rental profits alone. Unlike the tourism industry, a majority of this is derived from our own citizens, so no new wealth is added into the economy, it is simply redistributed into the hands of the one percent and whatever income tax the government takes from this.
Waste vector four: raw, naked corruption and financial mismanagement
While I haven’t included every single corruption case in the past 15 years, I’ve listed all the most notorious cases of corruption and financial mismanagement of state assets. Why this is wasteful is self-explanatory, unless you think they deserve to steal.
Sources are in Table 5 of the dataset. Even with these cases alone, the estimated total wealth lost to corruption sits at half a billion dollars.
Waste vector five: destroying the environment for land they won’t develop
Dredging is a major waste of money. I thought about including construction projects for endless airports, futsal fields, causeways, roads, sports centers, megaprojects, and other such “tharaggee” projects – and they do count because these politicians use these projects to funnel loan money to their pockets after quoting excessive prices – but dredging is the most indefensible and ridiculous among them all. I’ll explain why.
While this is by no means comprehensive, this is enough of a sample to provide a picture. I won’t start debunking every incoherent argument for dumping junk into our lagoons to reclaim land. Instead, I will remind you of two things:
1-
Most of these reclaimed lands from over a decade ago still remain unused and undeveloped. They simply can’t afford to.
2-
Our housing “crisis” is artificial. Much of our entire islands are given away to resorts that don’t even share most of their excess earnings with the public, and the reason why people are facing issues with housing in the first place is because they have to move to the capital to access basic resources and facilities.
Unused, unfinished, and useless. Not only have we destroyed nature for this vanity, but we’ve wasted almost half a billion dollars on this “tharaggee” clownery alone.
Comparisons: what are we sacrificing?
The summary calculations (see tables 9A to 9D in dataset) add up to at least US$ 17.54 billion that we could’ve spent on food security, energy/water subsidies, housing, welfare, debt financing, healthcare, and so many other things in the last 15 years.
US$ 17.54 billion into the hands of the elite one percent and their post-colonial capitalist allies in 15 years, US$ 1.17 billion every year. Billions of our money set to fire just so the multinational corporations can suck out profits into their native countries.
Billions of dollars that could’ve been spent on making our lives better wasted on buying foreign properties, visas, flashy cars, additional yachts, and other such things for our local elite. Billions of dollars to fund moral decay and inhumane luxury for a handful of elites who will run away to other countries with it all when this economy collapses.
Let me sum this up for you. Our annual waste on the elite one percent is the equivalent of:
All our foreign reserves (2025 average) and 42.43 percent more
More than 37 times the amount we spend on staple food imports
Almost double the amount we spend on all petroleum imports
More than 24 times the amount we spend on all our pharmaceutical imports (including insulin, vaccines, blood, antibiotics, etc.)
More than double our annual budget deficit average sum
Almost 80 percent of the entire production output of our tourism industry
Almost four times the amount of money we’ve spent on Covid-19 by 2021, which was also poorly managed
The entirety of all annual household expenditures for necessities like water, food, beverages, electricity, transportation, internet, and communications for every single household.
Every damned year.
Even with the amount we’re wasting on the elite one percent every year, we could erase all our external debts in a single presidential term and have US$ 1.453 billion left over as a surplus. Even if we use this wealth to implement universal basic income as provision of housing and all basic facilities like food, electricity, and water, we would still have over a hundred million dollars left over (from this amount) as a surplus every year.
This is also not factoring in the net worths of our incredibly, sinfully, murderously rich. If we factor in that amount – the value of their assets, wealth, properties, investments, and whatever else they’ve done with the money to find stable stores of value – the multi-billion dollar figure would be unfathomable.
Every crisis we have, every national problem we face, all our debt issues: every single one of these are manufactured and artificial. They are a choice. If it was about hard work and rewards for that, then the family breadwinners tirelessly working two jobs every week should be far richer today than any of these elites. It just doesn’t work that way, does it? And you’re not going to get any of it by asking politely, voting, or trying to “change the system from within” playing stupid capitalist electoral popularity contest games.
Now do you understand why I keep saying that in order for any good policies to work, wealth must be redistributed, and to ensure that wealth is managed solely in public interest, the constitution and governing apparatuses must be completely overhauled first?
Inqilaab (revolution), that is what we need, and that is only the beginning. It has to be popular, it can’t just be a group of insurgents. It has to be everyone.
It has to be outside of electoral politics. To make electoral politics functional, we must first purge the moral and corporate rot that’s built into the electoral system and the governing bodies it represents. It must intentionally cast out all the old faces and affiliates or ex-affiliates of previous parties, administrations, and dictators.
New faces, fresh blood. Reset it all.
Abstract:
This report is an open compilation and cross-analysis of secondary data on our political economy, particularly the circulation of value and wealth, as well as the systems of corruption they operate in. The aim is to quantify the disproportionate and excess wealth we’re wasting on the elite one percent every year while the majority suffers. The objective is simple: to demonstrate with facts and figures just how easy it really would be to overturn our economic crises and troubles – some just overnight. With the intention of encouraging independent confirmation and review of facts, this report draws from numerous public sources, such as the MMA statistics database, national budget books, intercensal data, monthly/annual publications of ministries, and various other official and public sources. Every calculation, analysis, and compilation is done on my own without using Silicon Valley’s incompetent tech-bro artificial “intelligence” slop generators.
Disclaimers:
Not only do I not endorse any politician or political party, I also think MDP, PPM, PNC, JP, MDA, Adhaalath, and other parties (and all their politicians and so-called “independent” candidates) are equally complicit in butchering our political economy with the corporate elites, even if they form new parties or run independently in the future. All of them, no exceptions.
I don’t ever want to be a leader, politician, or representative figure. I’m not invalidating those roles at all. That is not my personal skillset or what I want to do with my life.
So, do not use me or my work for anyone’s political campaigns.
Without completely overhauling all the organs of administering our political economy to make them more accessible and accountable to citizens through revolutionary action and continued commitment to civil society, no other reforms, policies, or electoral victories will last; but I will expand on this topic in another writing.
Mahal Ibrahim Abdulla is a writer, artist, musician, and aspiring social scientist. He works as the managing editor for Moosumi magazine. He is an honours graduate in Politics and Social Policy from the University of Leeds. His goal is to become a researcher – to eventually settle down and live a quiet life. His current research interests are political communication, social psychology, and the degrowth paradigm.
All comment pieces are the sole view of the author and do not reflect the editorial policy of the Maldives Independent. If you would like to write an opinion piece, please send proposals to editorial@maldivesindependent.com.
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