President Muizzu and Speaker Abdul Raheem have first face-to-face since Faisal’s dismissal

President Dr. Mohamed Muizzu and Speaker Abdul Raheem Abdulla met at the President’s Office on Thursday, in the first face-to-face meeting between the top leaders of the ruling People’s National Congress (PNC) since the latter’s son Ibrahim Faisal was sacked from the cabinet.

Faisal had been among the original appointees to President Muizzu’s cabinet on November 17, 2023.

He was dismissed from his role as tourism minister on January 28, for reasons that the President’s Office has not disclose.

In an interview to a local media outlet that day, Abdul Raheem, who had been on vacation in Malaysia at the time, publicly admitted to frayed ties between him and President Muizzu for the first time, commenting that “obviously this wouldn’t have happened if we were on good terms.”

But he made no further public comment regarding the decision after that, but was visibly absent from many of PNC’s events.

Abdul Raheem visited President Muizzu at his office on Thursday morning. However, neither the President’s Office nor the Parliament has made an official comment regarding the meeting.

Faisal’s dismissal followed monthslong rumors of friction between the President Muizzu and Abdul Raheem – once seen as his most powerful ally, having played an instrumental role in his successful 2023 presidential campaign.

Less than a week after Faisal’s dismissal, Mohamed Wajeeh, the father of Abdul Raheem’s son-in-law and legal affairs minister at the President’s Office Hisham Wajeeh, was dismissed from his role as the managing director of Maldives Ports Limited (MPL).

Abdul Raheem previously described his efforts to get President Muizzu to office as “the hardest but most successful” work of his long political career.

After President Muizzu took office in November 2023, he appointed Abdul Raheem as his special advisor. But Abdul Raheem later resigned from the role to successfully contest the 2024 parliamentary elections, in which the PNC won a supermajority of seats in the Parliament. It had been President Muizzu himself who recommended him to the role of Speaker of Parliament.