MDP abused super-majority status to corrupt state finances: Vice President

The Vice President of Maldives, Hussain Mohamed Latheef on Sunday has said that the Maldivian Democratic Party (MDP)-led former government abused its parliamentary super-majority status to corrupt state finances.

During a press conference held at the President’s Office on Saturday, the Minister of Finance Moosa Zameer revealed that the state finances had MVR 2 billion unaccounted for in the budget.

In response to this, the Vice President shared said on X, that the unaccounted money is resultant of abuse of power during the MDP-led regime.

Vice President Hussain further said that the former government had concealed foreign and other financial aids provided to the Maldives during the Covid-19 pandemic.

“They must be held accountable for all the unconstitutional actions,” Vice President said in his post.

At Saturday’s press conference, Zameer said that the Finance Ministry stopped its Weekly Fiscal Development series – which provides weekly updates of public finances in accordance with the Public Finance Act – earlier in June 2024 due to discrepancies in financial reports which included unrecorded budget allocations to developmental projects.

Finance Minister further said that discussions were held with Auditor General Hussain Niyazy on how to reconcile the financial records.

“We have discovered there is an approximate MVR 2 billion difference in the records, this means if we are to include it in our state budget for the year it would exceed by this amount compared to last year’s budget,” he added.

The minister affirmed the records will be amended only after seeking counsel from Attorney General Ahmed Usham.

Usham, who also joined the press conference, said that inclusion of the unaccounted money in this year’s budget is in breach of the Public Finance Act and the Constitution, which stipulates that the state can only incur expenses according to the budget.

The Attorney General further said that over the last few years, the state had spent excessive of the annual budget, and later included this in the supplementary budget, which he said was unlawful as well.

In response to these claims, former Minister of Finance Ibrahim Ameer on Saturday alleged the current government was deliberately not disclosing public finance statistics to conceal the wastage despite no physical works of any new urban initiatives have been formally launched.

Ameer further claimed that the time for the current administration to publicly disclose any discrepancies of the previous government has been long past due.