Proposed Hike in Water Charges Has No Basis

Beebeejaun's intention of raising the price of water by 10-20% is not justified. See government has already been abusing us with prohibitive fuel prices for way too long. Add to this one Ramgoolam who promised in November 2007 to change his name if we kept paying punitive electricity prices. Not only prices didn't go down but they went up by a full 10% last year. And the PM has kept his name.

Enjoy the vision.

STC Hedging Mess is Rs1.7 Billion Bigger

So we were told a few weeks ago. That's 57% more than the huge Rs3 billion figure supplied in Parliament two years ago. And quite fishy too because the STC doesn't have any price risk to manage: it just passes it on to us through the APM. Besides, two years that's an awful long time for so many eyes to be fooled.

My hunch is that the STC never had any billion-rupee hedging losses but that we were forced to pay abusive gas prices to make up for the fiscal shortfall created by the Sithanen-Mansoor's flat tax experiment given that the proverbial robust growth rates never arrived. 

This aspect of Shaitanomics has already played a part in preventing us and our economy from participating in the global rebound underway by making a dent in our overall competitiveness. And Pravind Jugnauth's intention of increasing excise duties on petroleum by 10% will make sure it will have another one to play in keeping us in our economic slumber. He should instead increase the special levy on banks or nudge corporate taxes upwards.

All of this doesn't look good for Mo Ibrahim's poster child for governance, does it?

Oil Prices Should Come Down Immediately by 25%

From its current level of Rs 34.10 a litre. That would bring it to about Rs 25 a litre which would be closer to real prices. The recent modification of the APM formula from 20% quarterly variations to 7.5% monthly variations is the latest of a series of intellectually dishonest arrows that Sithanen has been retrieving from his bean-counting quiver. It is a device to prevent Mauritian voters from immediately benefiting from the collapse in oil prices so that his ability to fleece us with a 15% VAT remains unchecked. 

That's kind of stupid because energy is an important building block of our competitiveness. In fact, he should have capped the amount of money government makes when oil prices went through the roof between July 2005 to July 2008 and rapidly reduce pump prices when oil prices collapsed thereafter. Of course that's way too much to ask from a bean-counter. He preferred instead to viciously tax us to death when oil prices skyrocketed and come up with a little contraption to keep them artificially high when the latter crashed.