Rogers Capital hosted its highly anticipated Budget Breakfast 2026 on 22 June, at La Piazza, Vivea Business Park, bringing together business leaders, policymakers, economists, legal experts and financial professionals to unpack the key measures, implications and strategic outlook of the Budget 2026–2027. The event opened with remarks from Antish Bissessur, Managing Director of Rogers Capital – Fiduciary, followed by a wide-ranging panel discussion moderated by Shafeenaz Molotoo Ramgoolam, Head of Advisory at Rogers Capital – Tax.
The panel brought together six distinguished voices: Dr Vimal Thakoor, Chief Economist, Head of Economic Planning Department and government representative ; Mr Ali Mansoor, Economist and former Financial Secretary of the Government of Mauritius; Mr Daniel Essoo, Chief Executive Officer of the Mauritius Bankers Association; Mr Ryan Allas, Managing Director of Rogers Capital – Tax; Mrs Priscilla Pattoo, Founder and Associate Director of LawLine Mauritius and Mrs Johanne Hague, Barrister and Founder of CMS Prism. . Together, they examined the budget through the lenses of fiscal consolidation, taxation, financial services regulation, governance, investment confidence and long-term economic transformation.
Opening the morning, Mr Bissessur set the tone for the discussion with a call to sustained competitiveness and strategic ambition. “The budget is more than a fiscal exercise. It is a statement of national priorities. It reflects how we intend to strengthen competitiveness, allocate resources, and prepare Mauritius for the opportunities and challenges of a rapidly changing world. This budget recognises precisely that, and places considerable emphasis on future readiness, digital transformation, artificial intelligence, skills development and investment — these are not simply policies. These are the foundations upon which future prosperity will be built,” said Mr Bissessur.
Dr Vimal Thakoor, contextualised the budget as a dual-mandate exercise: consolidating fiscal discipline while laying the groundwork for a future-oriented economy. He acknowledged the structural pressures that shaped its priorities. He stated, “The budget deficit of the previous year has come down to 6% this year. And if the Chagos funding had materialised, the outturn would have been stronger than what is projected. Notwithstanding the need to support the economy, the efforts on expenditure consolidation are visible. What you also see is that the increase in public debt has been contained — and the management of that debt is critical, because if you look at the composition, a significant portion is going towards debt servicing rather than the social strategy, education and health that matter most.”
Mr Ali Mansoor, Economist, commended the budget for confronting structural issues that previous budgets had sidestepped, while calling for a bolder and more export-driven growth strategy to accompany fiscal repair. He explained, “This budget is a considerable credit because it is one of the few in recent times that addresses structural issues rather than offering quick fixes. It addresses the things which corporations and technical experts have long identified — pension reform, drug policy, digital transformation. The government needs to be given credit for that. At the same time, the real question is growth. The budget projects three and a half to four percent, which is creditable for stabilisation, but transitioning to high-income status would require a growth rate of around 6 percent — and that requires us to move from stabilisation to transformational reform.”
Mr Daniel Essoo, Chief Executive Officer of the Mauritius Bankers Association, addressed the compressed timeline for the proposed banking legislative reform, welcoming the quality of engagement between the banking sector and regulators while raising questions about adequate consultation time. He concluded, “Relationships with public authorities and regulators have become much better — there is a shared understanding that we have to work together to face issues. When it comes to banking legislation, there is a lot that everyone agrees needs to be updated. However, I would flag the timeline. When legislation has been passed without adequate time for discussion, it can result in rules which are, in practice, very difficult to implement. We do not have concerns about the quality of our relationship with regulators and legislators — it is the timeline that gives us pause, and we would want to ensure that the private sector has meaningful input before these three pieces of legislation are finalised.”
Ryan Allas, Managing Director of Rogers Capital – Tax , offered a detailed assessment of the budget’s tax measures, welcoming the government’s focus on expenditure control while raising concerns about specific measures affecting the financial services sector — particularly the VAT treatment of management company supplies to global business companies. He highlighted, “For a number of years, the approach to raising revenue has been to increase taxes broadly. In this budget, we have seen the government pay specific attention to curbing expenditure, which is a very important shift. There are a number of tax increases which address social costs — excise duty, plastics and so on — and no investor will be deterred by taxes on social harm. However, there are measures, particularly around VAT on supplies by management companies to global business companies, that I believe should be reviewed before the Finance Bill is issued, as they create an unintended cost burden on a sector we are trying to make more competitive.”
Mrs Priscilla Pattoo, Founder and Associate Director of LawLine Mauritius, addressed the governance and regulatory dimensions of the budget, framing the strengthening of institutional frameworks as a prerequisite for sustained investor confidence, particularly in the context of the 2027 ESAAMLG Mutual Evaluation. “Investors, when they look at an international financial centre, look at credibility, certainty and clarity in the system so that they can build trust and confidence. The proposals in this budget are, in my view, responsive and corrective measures to gaps that existed. The proposed amendments to legislation — the new rules around stablecoins, open banking, the resolution regime — send signals to the investor community that we are serious. Putting the right framework in place is good. But yes, it will also increase compliance obligations, and the law should not move faster than the capacity of the stakeholders and regulators who must implement it. Training and implementation must move at the same pace as legislation,” she said.
Lastly, Mrs Johanne Hague, Barrister and Founder of CMS Prism, examined the budget’s introduction of a compliance agreement framework, welcoming the principle while calling for robust safeguards to protect taxpayers’ fundamental rights throughout the process. She stated, “The concept of a compliance agreement is not new — we have variants of it already. But this goes a step further by establishing an official framework in which tax liability can be agreed between the authority and the taxpayer. The principle is sound. However, we must absolutely ensure that taxpayers’ fundamental rights are protected. We have had clients who have faced significant mental health pressures as a result of tax assessments, and the pressure to settle can sometimes outweigh what is fundamentally an unfair assessment. Independent access to legal and tax advice, meaningful time to consider options, and the preservation of the right to have the conduct of the revenue authority subjected to judicial oversight — these are non-negotiable safeguards.”
The Budget Breakfast 2026 reaffirmed the value of bringing together diverse and senior perspectives to examine what a budget means in practice — beyond the headlines and the headline figures. From fiscal consolidation and pension reform to banking legislation, tax policy and governance, the discussion made clear that the real work of Budget 2026–2027 lies not in the measures announced, but in the rigour and commitment with which they are implemented in the months ahead.
