The pension overhaul in this Budget is, in its direction, both defensible and overdue. But the way it has been designed produces an uncomfortable result – a reform sold on fairness lands hardest on a group that isn’t rich.

Every year at budget time, it’s very much the same ritual: the budget speech lands, and within hours it gets sorted into a box. Pro-business or pro-social. Pro-demand-side or pro-supply side. MSM or PTR (with MMM orbiting somewhere).

Evaco Ltd was placed in receivership on 26 May 2026. Its own published accounts had been signalling distress for at least two years. What the numbers said, where the risk now sits, and what other developers, lenders, and a jurisdiction built on foreign property capital should take from it.

The standard account of Mauritius's 1990s financial services pivot is tidy: the EPZ matured, wages rose, and a pragmatic government found a new pillar. It might also be incomplete, because , it omits the actors who most directly shaped the transition and what they stood to gain. This proposition aims to dig a little deeper: the shift from EPZ manufacturing to offshore financial services was not merely a policy response to economic maturity.

When valuing a private company, the discount rate is where most of the real work - and most of the debate - happens. One component sits at the centre of that debate more than any other: the Company-Specific Risk Premium, or CSRP.