Government’s changes to resort lease payments will cost Maldives US$135 million: MDP
06 Mar 2012, 8:06 PM
The new government’s decision to allow extended resort leases to be paid in installments, rather than upfront at the end of the lease, will immediately take US$135 million of the country’s coffers, the Maldivian Democratic Party (MDP) has claimed.
New Tourism Minister Ahmed Adheeb was not responding at time of press. Former Tourism Minister Dr Mariyam Zulfa explained that Nasheed’s government had offered resorts the option of extending resort lease periods from 25 to up to 50 years.
“Under the regulations the resort lease period was extended to 50 years, with a clause that this would cost US$100,000 every year. But the regulations left open to interpretation how this was to be collected,” she said.
“The Nasheed government had requested that those resorts extending to a 50 year lease pay in a lump sum,” she said, “but while I was Tourism Minister, Gasim Ibrahim and Ahmed ‘Redwave’ Saleem kept pressuring me to let them pay on a yearly basis. They didn’t want to give any money to the government, and soon after the government changed they got what they wanted. [The installments] will only be payable at the end of the current lease periods – it is a huge loss to the treasury.”
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