By Shruti Menon Seeboo
On the evening of 29 April, the Indian Business Council convened one of its most timely and consequential panel discussions to date. Against the backdrop of an increasingly volatile global order — shaped by the ongoing conflict in the Middle East, and shifting US-China dynamics — industry leaders gathered at Hennessy Park Hotel to ask a pointed question: what does all of this mean for Mauritius, and how ready are we to respond?
Moderated with precision and purpose by Kamal Hawabhay, Managing Director of GWMS Ltd., the discussion brought together four distinguished panellists: Shamima Mallam-Hassam, Managing Director of Trident Trust (Mauritius) Ltd.; Daniel Essoo, CEO of the Mauritius Bankers Association; Marcelo Aleman, CEO of Emtel Ltd.; and Professor Kiran Bhujun, Director of Tertiary Education and Scientific Research. The result was a frank, commercially grounded, and at times sobering exchange — one that made clear that Mauritius stands at a genuine crossroads.
A world being reshaped
Opening the discussion, Hawabhay set the tone with clarity: this was not an evening for handwringing, but for forward-looking thinking. He noted that Mauritius remains “a stable, compliant, and properly regulated platform for international businesses,” highlighting that the island is not on any grey list and continues to benefit from pre-2017 provisions under its double tax treaty with India. The question, he stressed, was not whether Mauritius had something to offer — but whether it was ready to capture the moment.
Shamima Mallam-Hassam opened the substantive discussion with a macro lens. For her, the current environment is not a temporary disruption but a structural shift. “The global financial system is not merely evolving, but it’s being reshaped,” she said, drawing connections between the Middle East conflict, the Ukraine war, and broader geopolitical realignments. Businesses and investors, she noted, are actively reassessing where and how capital flows — and which jurisdictions can be trusted to intermediate it.
Yet Mallam-Hassam was candid about a persistent challenge. When the conflict in the Middle East began making headlines, the jurisdictions that came to mind first were Singapore and Hong Kong — not Mauritius. “We’re suffering from that image and that visibility,” she acknowledged. The island’s value proposition, she argued, is real and substantial, but it has not been communicated with sufficient urgency or reach. More fundamentally, she challenged the notion that safety alone is enough. “Where there are uncertainties, it’s not only safety and stability. As much as safety and stability is important, it’s also the speed and the scale that you can react.” On both counts, she felt, Mauritius had been “a little bit too late or a little bit not enough.”
Her call to action was equally direct: Mauritius must evolve its identity. “We probably need to position ourselves moving forward as not just a safe or stable jurisdiction, but one that is strategic for industry and for businesses.”
Capital is already moving
If Mallam-Hassam offered the strategic frame, Daniel Essoo provided the ground-level evidence that something real is already happening. His opening was disarmingly human — recounting a chance encounter at a local supermarket with two separate acquaintances, both of whom had recently fled the instability in the UAE. One had been in Dubai setting up an asset management business and returned immediately when the conflict escalated. The other, a friend who leads a financial institution in the UAE, had landed just three days after the situation worsened.
“I’m glad we’re here with the children,” his friend had told him. “Glad I’ll be here for a while.” These anecdotes, Essoo noted, are not isolated. Within days of the conflict intensifying, member banks reported meaningful capital inflows. “Several banks said, we’ve had deposits move towards Mauritius. One bank reported 200 million USD within the first few days of the conflict, just moving to Mauritius.” The safe haven instinct, long theorised about Mauritius, was being borne out in real numbers.
Essoo also offered a philosophical anchor for the moment: “The word crisis comes from the Greek word for decision, the turning point.” It is precisely at such turning points, he argued, that individuals and businesses make choices that define their next chapter — and Mauritius needs to be ready to receive them.
He described what he termed a “first wave” — people who have come to wait out the trouble, still running operations remotely, not yet committing to a permanent move. Behind them, a second wave is forming: families considering relocation, businesses beginning to evaluate Mauritius as an operational base. “We’re now getting queries about the business environment in Mauritius,” he confirmed. Crucially, he also commended the authorities for the pace of their response, noting that changes to immigration rules — including a concierge service, fast-track applications, and visas extended to two years — had been introduced within weeks of the conflict beginning. “It’s not easy for government to take decisions particularly quickly,” he said, but the responsiveness had been notable.
The digital and operational dimension
Marcelo Aleman, bringing a practitioner’s eye from years leading digital transformation across Africa, Latin America, and the Caribbean, delivered some of the evening’s most forward-looking remarks — and arguably its most ambitious vision. He opened by acknowledging the well-known challenge: Singapore and Hong Kong are top of mind for relocating businesses because they are seen as destinations that are ready. But rather than treat this as a permanent disadvantage, Aleman reframed the conversation around a transformative opportunity that Mauritius is uniquely placed to seize — technology and the digital economy.
“AI is opening the doors and the eyes of everybody in a world of possibilities we couldn’t imagine before,” he said, pointing to a striking example: two fifteen-year-olds who had used AI to build a tool that could detect AI-generated homework — because their teachers were using AI to mark it and getting it wrong. The story, he argued, illustrated how rapidly the rules of knowledge and skill-building are being rewritten. “What they knew was coding. How they learned to code? Through AI.”
From this, Aleman drew a direct and practical implication for Mauritius. If the island were to pivot decisively towards technology — through coding schools, tax incentives for tech entrepreneurs, and institutional support for software development — the multiplier effect could be profound. “You can basically open a software factory with three people,” he said. “A lot of companies in Mauritius buy software solutions from different companies around the world. We can now develop that here.” The logic was clear: build the skills, give companies the incentive to bring knowledge onshore, and a magnifying effect follows — coding creates intelligence, new businesses adopt it, and the economy progressively digitalises.
His vision for what Mauritius could become was unambiguous. “If I were asked how Mauritius should position itself as a digital hub, I would say: we are building a digital-enabled society. We are going to be the first of our kind. We are going to rely on economic and digital services, digital education, digital health. While you work and live in paradise, you will be living in the future.”
Aleman also addressed a specific and increasingly relevant question: whether Mauritius can position itself as a disaster recovery and business continuity destination for international companies. His answer was characteristically direct. “Mauritius is uniquely positioned to be part of the strategy for businesses as their DR option,” he said, noting the island’s distance from conflict zones, its relative immunity to major natural disasters, and its available land. “Start building data centres. When? The answer would be now.” He acknowledged the regulatory questions that need resolving — energy concessions, green data centre incentives, water cooling — but was clear that once those answers are in place, “the building should begin and customers will come.” He painted a compelling picture of what that future could look like: “There’s a lot of land that can be used for data centres, for solar energy — that can create this new signature of a digital Mauritius.”
On the comparison with Singapore — a thread that ran through much of the evening — Aleman was both honest and energising. “It took Singapore more than 70 years to become what they are right now,” he noted. “But if we compare the beginnings of Singapore to the reality of Mauritius today, Mauritius is better positioned.” The reason, he argued, is that Mauritius has something Singapore and Dubai did not have at their founding moments: access to the internet, global connectivity, and the ability to learn from others’ journeys. “We can learn from our mistakes and create our own path.” His conclusion was a call to ambition: “Let’s set the ambition that this country will be a 100 billion GDP country ten years from now. Let’s find our own ways, our own identity. Mauritius is not Singapore. It should be different. It can be better in different ways.”
Education as a strategic asset
Professor Kiran Bhujun brought a dimension to the discussion that might have been overlooked in a purely financial conversation: the role of education and talent in positioning Mauritius as a long-term destination. He was keen to place the current moment in a longer arc. “We should not look at the event only from the perspective of the Middle East War,” he said, pointing out that Mauritius’ higher education sector has been actively responding to global instability — including the Ukraine conflict — for the past two years.
What has emerged from that effort is a deliberate marketing pitch that resonates powerfully with families weighing their options. “What we are marketing now from a higher education perspective is a safe environment, clean environment, clean water, blue sky — a place where you can thrive, where you can study, and where you can stay and keep working.” The results, he noted, are beginning to show, with an increase in international student numbers and a surge of interest from international institutions seeking partnerships with Mauritius.
He cited the Indian Institute of Management’s joint programme with the University of Technology Mauritius and the arrival of the Indian Institute of Technology for research collaboration as concrete evidence of this growing interest. Mauritius’ ratification of the Addis Convention for the Recognition of Qualifications within Africa has also opened new doors, with countries from the Middle East among those now seeking to trigger the convention’s mutual recognition provisions.
On the question of graduate readiness, Prof. Bhujun outlined the micro-credential framework as a direct response to the pace of industry change. “We’re going to companies and saying, let’s work together and create a micro-credential — a small, three-month module which is being given credits that is aligned with your requirements now.” These credentials, he explained, can be stacked progressively into diplomas, degrees, and master’s programmes — what he described, with some pride, as the “Honeycomb model.”
He also raised a demographic reality that adds urgency to the internationalisation agenda. “In 1984, 48,000 students sat for the CPE exam. In 2024, 16,000 students sat for that same exam — which means in 40 years, we’ve got 60% fewer students.” With roughly 40 universities now serving a student population one-third the size it once was, internationalisation is not an aspiration but a necessity. “Scholarship is to create ambassadors of the brand,” he said. “But for that to happen, you must have a brand that is worth marketing.”
Measures, momentum, and what remains to be done
The panel’s second act focused squarely on whether the measures introduced so far are sufficient — and what more needs to be done. Mallam-Hassam summarised the current approach to re-domiciliation, explaining that the key shift has been moving requirements from conditions that must be met before relocation to conditions that follow it. The principle, she said, is “conditions subsequent rather than conditions precedent” — a practical change that dramatically reduces friction for incoming businesses. She noted that the Registrar of Companies had committed to processing applications within hours, and that the Bank of Mauritius had extended the utility bill requirement from three months to six, while offering flexibility on proof of address for businesses relocating from jurisdictions like the UAE where postal infrastructure differs markedly.
Essoo echoed this on the banking side, describing the KYC challenge with characteristic directness. In the UAE, utilities are often bundled into rental agreements, and many residents rely on PO boxes. Applying standard documentation requirements rigidly creates unnecessary barriers. “The regulator has kindly indicated that they leave it to banks to determine what is reasonable to have as proof of address,” he explained — a pragmatic flexibility that maintains the integrity of compliance without making it an obstacle to legitimate business. He was equally proud to note that Mauritius currently complies with all 40 of the FATF recommendations. “That’s a mark of safety,” he said, “and there is a lot of determination within the regulatory community that we don’t lose that.”
He was also honest about the limits: not every business relocating from the Middle East will find Mauritius a perfect fit. Source of funds and source of wealth verification remain areas of genuine complexity, particularly for businesses with unconventional asset structures. “Different banks will have their risk appetite, and that is part of the market,” he acknowledged.
Comparing Mauritius to Dubai, Mallam-Hassam was equally measured. “Dubai is Dubai. The lifestyle in Dubai is very different.” But the comparison, she argued, misses the point. For a specific profile of business and family — one seeking legal certainty, political neutrality, a multilingual environment, and quality of life alongside operational capability — Mauritius offers something singular. “People are looking for alternatives, and that’s where Mauritius can be that good alternative — because we are rightly positioned between Africa and Asia, and we are also in a good time zone.”
Essoo put it perhaps most memorably: “If you’re looking for a safe environment where children can plant trees, do sports, learn well, speak different languages, and live in a fairly comfortable environment while another member of the family does international business from here — then this space works for you.” He added, with characteristic pragmatism: “We have something. We’d love to talk about it. It may suit, it may not suit. We’re very happy to see how we can support.”
The evening’s discussion left attendees with a sense of genuine, if calibrated, optimism. The signals are real — capital is moving, families are arriving, institutions are inquiring, and the policy framework is being adapted at pace. The challenges are equally real: visibility, speed of execution, and the gap between aspiration and perception on the global stage remain live issues.
But the more enduring takeaway may be this: Mauritius does not need to be Singapore or Dubai. It needs to be a better version of itself — more visible, more agile, more confident in articulating what it genuinely has to offer. As Hawabhay noted in closing, the work is already under way. The task now is to accelerate it. The IBC’s panel discussion was, in that sense, more than a conversation about a distant conflict. It was a call to action — and, for those in the room, a reminder that moments of global disruption are also, invariably, moments of opportunity.
