This article follows The Meridian's original energy crisis report: Mauritius Is Now Running on a Clock: India Cannot Supply HFO and the CEB Has Until April. Minister Assirvaden's 23 March press conference confirms and extends the emergency documented there.
The minister spoke on Monday. He gave the numbers. He gave them honestly and in full — which is more than many governments in this region do when the news is bad. Two cargoes. Cargo one: 33,000 tonnes of heavy fuel oil secured in India during a recent ministerial visit, arriving Port Louis on 1 April, at a cost of Rs 1.2 billion. Cargo two: 32,000 tonnes chartered from Singapore, arriving 14 to 16 April, at a cost of $26.8 million — approximately Rs 1.26 billion. Total: 65,000 tonnes. Total cost: Rs 2.46 billion. Both cargoes, the minister noted, came in at Rs 500 million above original estimates.
The Meridian's job is to put those numbers in context. Because a number without a benchmark is not information. It is a press release.
I. The Verified Arithmetic
The minister gave volumes. That allows precise calculation. The Meridian has done it.
Rs 1,200,000,000 ÷ 33,000 tonnes = Rs 36,364 per tonne. At Rs 46.37/USD, this implies approximately $784 per tonne. Singapore HSFO spot: ~$376/tonne. India cargo premium over spot: approximately 108%.
$26,800,000 ÷ 32,000 tonnes = $838 per tonne. Singapore HSFO spot: ~$376/tonne. Singapore cargo premium over spot: approximately 123%. Rs equivalent: approximately Rs 38,835 per tonne.
Average: Rs 37,580 per tonne or approximately $811 per tonne. Singapore spot: Rs 17,435/tonne. Mauritius is paying 2.2 times the Singapore market price for HFO it cannot find anywhere else.
Rs 1,789 per tonne · approximately $40/tonne at 2021 rates. The world has changed. HFO at $40/tonne is a memory from another era. But from $40 to $811 in five years — a 20-fold increase in dollar terms — is a number that demands structural explanation, not just geopolitical sympathy.
II. Why the Price Is So Far Above Spot
The Singapore HSFO spot price is approximately $376 per tonne. Mauritius paid $838 per tonne for its Singapore cargo and $784 per tonne for its India cargo. Both are more than double the spot market price. Before concluding that Mauritius was overcharged, it is necessary to understand the components of that premium — because some of them are real, structural, and unavoidable, while others are the cost of poor planning.
Adding the base spot price ($376), the freight and war-risk premium ($200 to $250), and the emergency procurement premium ($150 to $200) produces an indicative fair range of approximately $726 to $826 per tonne for HFO delivered to Mauritius on emergency terms in the current market. The $784 India cargo sits at the lower end of that range. The $838 Singapore cargo sits slightly above it.
The numbers are painful. They are not, on this analysis, obviously fraudulent. They are the price of being a small island with no energy sovereignty, no strategic reserves, and no procurement framework that allows it to buy ahead of the emergency rather than into it.
Mauritius did not pay a bribe. It paid a penalty. The penalty for having no strategic petroleum reserve. The penalty for letting the India supply arrangement collapse without a backup. The penalty for running a 100 per cent import-dependent energy system with no buffer. The Rs 500 million overrun on each cargo is not corruption. It is the invoice for unpreparedness.
III. The Rs 500 Million Overrun: What It Actually Means
The minister stated that both cargoes came in at Rs 500 million above original estimates. That detail is the most revealing number in the entire press conference — more revealing than the total cost, more revealing than the volumes. It tells us that the government entered procurement negotiations for emergency HFO with a budget that was Rs 1 billion short of what the market was going to charge.
An original estimate of Rs 700 million for Cargo 1 (Rs 1.2 billion actual) implies a base price assumption of approximately $455 per tonne — plausible for a contracted annual supply arrangement but entirely unrealistic for emergency spot procurement during a Gulf war. An original estimate of approximately Rs 760 million for Cargo 2 ($26.8 million actual) implies a similar disconnect between what the government modelled and what the market demanded.
This is not a minor forecasting error. It is a Rs 1 billion collective miscalculation on two procurements that together cover less than a quarter of Mauritius's annual HFO requirement. If the government's planning assumptions are Rs 500 million off on a 33,000-tonne cargo, the June 2026 budget's energy cost projections deserve intense scrutiny. The NAO FY2024-25 audit documented that the budget deficit outturn was Rs 66.8 billion against an estimate of Rs 26.8 billion — a Rs 40 billion miss. The pattern of systematically underestimating costs is not new. It is structural.
When a government consistently underestimates its costs by large multiples — Rs 40 billion on the fiscal deficit, Rs 1 billion on two fuel cargoes — the question is not whether there was a forecasting error. The question is whether the estimates were ever meant to be accurate, or whether they were meant to be presentable.
IV. The India Relationship: What Happened and What It Cost
Cargo 1 was secured during a ministerial visit to India — a government-to-government procurement rather than an open STC tender. That is, in principle, exactly what Mauritius should be doing: using its diplomatic relationships to access fuel at managed prices rather than competing on the open spot market. The problem is that the price paid — Rs 36,364 per tonne — suggests that even the government-to-government channel did not produce a meaningful discount over spot-plus-freight. At $784 per tonne, the India cargo is expensive by any standard available to a country with strategic partnerships in the region.
India is the world's third-largest oil importer. It has access to discounted Russian crude. It has operational refinery capacity. It has a government-to-government petroleum framework that has produced favourable pricing for other partner countries. The question of why Mauritius's closest large-economy partner charged $784 per tonne for an emergency cargo — more than double the Singapore spot price — is one the minister's press conference did not address. It is one the Mauritius government should be pressing in its bilateral energy conversations.
V. The Structural Failure Behind the Emergency Number
Sixty-five thousand tonnes covers approximately three to four months of the CEB's HFO requirements. It buys time. It does not buy security. Mauritius's underlying vulnerability — 90.9 per cent energy import dependency, no strategic petroleum reserve, HFO-powered generation with no short-term alternative — is unchanged by the arrival of two tankers in April. The emergency will recur. The only variables are when, at what price, and whether the next procurement will carry another Rs 500 million overrun because the government's planners again assumed a price that the market was not offering.
The longer-term answer is visible in the government's own policy documents: a Rs 30 billion investment in solar energy and biomass targeting 35 per cent renewable in the electricity mix by 2028, with an ambition of 60 per cent by 2030. Every percentage point of domestic renewable generation capacity is a percentage point reduction in the exposure to exactly the kind of market shock that produced this week's Rs 2.46 billion invoice. The Rs 2.46 billion is not just a fuel bill. It is the strongest possible argument for accelerating the energy transition that the government says it is committed to but has not yet delivered at the pace the crisis demands.
VI. The CEB Fraud Dossier: What the Emergency Obscures
The Rs 2.46 billion emergency procurement is the headline. Behind it sits a deeper record of institutional failure at the CEB that predates the Gulf war and cannot be blamed on Hormuz. The Meridian has documented three verified fraud and governance failures that together represent a pattern of dysfunction no Energy Efficiency Act amendment will address.
In December 2023, the CEB wired Rs 12 million to a company impersonating Hyundai Global Service Europe, which held a legitimate 10-year maintenance contract for three MAN engines at Fort George power station. The internal inquiry attributed the fraud to a computer hack and found no direct staff involvement. Senior CEB staff publicly called the finding "simplistic and misleading" — noting that the investigators were themselves involved in the payment procedures, making them judge and party simultaneously. No corrective payment procedures were implemented afterwards. The cybersecurity explanation was never validated by independent technical evidence.
In 2023 the CEB awarded a Rs 5 billion solar farm contract to CorexSolar International Ltd. Two years after signing, no infrastructure had been built. The CEB imposed a daily penalty of Rs 360,000 for failure to provide land ownership documents, accumulating to over Rs 60 million in fines. In June 2025 the CEB seized a Rs 181 million security bond. The contract was not terminated. CorexSolar received its first EIA permit only in early 2025, two years after the contract was signed. Assirvaden, then in opposition, had called for the CEB Board to be dismissed over this contract and promised full transparency once in power. He is now the minister responsible for its resolution.
This case requires careful attribution. In 2010, the CEB Board — then chaired by Patrick Assirvaden — approved a contract to Alternative Power Solution Limited for 660,000 Philips LED bulbs at Rs 23.37 million, despite warnings from the Mauritius Revenue Authority and the Maurice Ile Durable Committee against the supplier. The bulbs were counterfeit. None were ever supplied. In 2019 the Supreme Court ordered the CEB to pay approximately Rs 30 million to Standard Bank as a result of this failure. The minister who now manages the CEB's institutional crisis was Board Chairman when this contract was approved.
The Energy Efficiency Act amendment Assirvaden is now advancing will mandate energy audits for large consumers, introduce Time-of-Use tariffs to shift peak demand from the 6pm to 9pm window, and tighten import standards for air conditioners. These are rational demand-side measures. They do not address the supply-side institutional failures documented above. Reducing consumption is the right long-term direction. But an institution that paid Rs 12 million to a fraudster, awarded Rs 5 billion to a developer who built nothing, and is now buying emergency HFO at 2.2 times market price does not need only better energy labelling regulations. It needs a structural governance overhaul.
VII. The Minister Who Warned of This — Before He Became the Minister
There is one dimension of Monday's press conference that the Mauritian press largely passed over in silence. Patrick Assirvaden, the man who stood before the cameras to announce Rs 2.46 billion in emergency fuel costs, is the same Patrick Assirvaden who, as Labour opposition MP in charge of the energy brief, delivered a press conference warning precisely that the CEB was being driven into the ground.
In that earlier statement, delivered when he sat on the opposition benches, Assirvaden was unsparing. The CEB deficit, he said, had reached Rs 4.9 billion. The institution spent Rs 8.1 billion per year on heavy fuel oil, oil and engine spare parts. A further Rs 8.2 billion on coal, bagasse and wind energy. Rs 3.2 billion on salaries and pensions. The CEB, he warned, had not a single rupee left in its accounts and was borrowing to meet its daily operating costs. He called the then-Minister of Energy, Joe Lesjongard, "minis zero mega watt" — a minister of zero megawatts. He accused the government of having "fini le CEB complètement." He promised that once the Alliance du Changement came to power, everything would be set right.
The Alliance du Changement came to power. Patrick Assirvaden became the Minister of Energy. On his first major test — the HFO emergency he had watched building from the opposition benches — the CEB paid Rs 37,580 per tonne for fuel that trades at Rs 17,435 on the spot market. The Rs 500 million overrun on each cargo arrived under his watch. The institution he promised to rescue is now borrowing to buy emergency fuel at 2.2 times the market price.
This is not a partisan observation. The Meridian does not take sides in Mauritian politics. It is a structural observation: the problems Assirvaden identified in opposition — the Rs 4.9 billion deficit, the Rs 8.1 billion annual fuel bill, the institution borrowing to survive — were not created by one government and will not be solved by another unless the structural dependency on imported HFO is addressed. The Africa Energy Portal confirmed CEB losses exceeding Rs 4.8 billion in 2023. The numbers Assirvaden cited in opposition were accurate. The question he must now answer as minister is the same one he put to his predecessor: what is the plan?
VIII. The Questions This Procurement Must Answer
The Meridian does not allege fraud. We allege nothing without evidence. What we do is arithmetic, and the arithmetic produces a gap that the minister's press conference did not explain. At $811 per tonne paid against a defensible all-in delivered cost of $450 to $500 per tonne for a small island buyer in a disrupted market, there is a difference of approximately $300 to $350 per tonne — multiplied across 65,000 tonnes — that represents somewhere between Rs 900 million and Rs 1.05 billion of unaccounted premium above what the market and logistics reasonably justify.
That gap may have an innocent explanation. Emergency procurement is expensive. Panic carries a price. Mauritius is not Shell. But "it was an emergency" is not an audit. It is a press conference. The following questions are not hostile. They are the minimum that Rs 2.46 billion of public money demands.
The minister said Cargo 1 was secured during a visit to India. A genuine government-to-government deal at Indian refinery cost — where India refines Russian crude at significant discount — should have produced a price well below $376 Singapore spot, not $784 per tonne above it. If the India cargo cost $784 per tonne through a G2G arrangement, either the arrangement went through a trading intermediary who captured the margin between refinery cost and the price Mauritius paid, or it was a spot transaction rebranded as diplomatic procurement. The STC must disclose the name of the counterparty, the FOB loading port price, and whether any trading company sat between the Indian government and the Mauritius payment.
$811 per tonne delivered to Port Louis breaks down into a commodity price, a freight rate, insurance, and port costs. The commodity component should be close to Singapore HSFO spot of approximately $376. Freight from India to Port Louis on a 33,000-tonne cargo under current war-risk conditions adds perhaps $40 to $60 per tonne. Insurance and port costs add perhaps $20 to $30. That produces a legitimate all-in cost of $450 to $470 per tonne. The difference between $470 and $784 — approximately $314 per tonne on 33,000 tonnes — is Rs 478 million. What is it? The STC must publish the freight contract and the commodity invoice separately.
The STC's mandate requires open international bidding for petroleum products. Emergency procurement may justify waiving standard tender timelines — but it does not justify waiving documentation. Did the STC obtain any competing quotes before accepting $784 per tonne from the India source and $838 per tonne from Singapore? If the CEB's tanks were truly running out, was there genuinely no time to obtain a second quote? The procurement file should show this. If it does not exist, that is itself a finding.
The minister confirmed both cargoes came in Rs 500 million above original estimates. An original estimate of approximately Rs 700 million for 33,000 tonnes implies a planning assumption of roughly $455 per tonne. Singapore HSFO has been above $300 since mid-2022 and has been elevated above $350 since the Gulf conflict began in early March 2026. Any competent energy procurement desk monitoring market prices would have known by mid-March that $455 per tonne was unrealistic. Who produced the original estimate? When was it produced? Was it stress-tested against current market conditions before procurement was authorised at that budget ceiling?
The CEB paid Rs 12 million to a fraudster in December 2023. The internal inquiry found no staff involvement and implemented no corrective payment procedures. The same institution is now processing a Rs 2.46 billion emergency payment. What enhanced authorisation controls were applied to a transaction of this size? Who at the STC and CEB board level signed the payment authority? Was the NAO or any independent oversight body notified prior to commitment? These are not trick questions. They are the basic governance questions that any institution spending Rs 2.46 billion of public money should be able to answer in 24 hours.
The Rs 5 billion solar farm contract awarded in 2023 was supposed to reduce exactly this kind of HFO dependency. Two years later, no infrastructure exists. Rs 181 million in bonds have been seized. The CEB is paying Rs 2.46 billion for emergency fossil fuel while a renewable energy contract that was meant to reduce that dependency sits unbuilt in Rivière-du-Rempart. Assirvaden promised full transparency on Corexsolar when he took power. The Rs 2.46 billion emergency procurement is the direct financial consequence of renewable projects that were contracted but never delivered. Where is the Corexsolar transparency he promised?
None of these questions are an accusation. They are the questions any Mauritian taxpayer is entitled to ask about Rs 2.46 billion of public money spent in 48 hours on emergency fuel at more than double the market price. A government that cannot answer them is not a government managing a crisis. It is a government hoping the crisis is large enough that nobody looks at the invoice.
Minister Assirvaden confirmed the numbers and deserves credit for doing so in full. Two cargoes. Sixty-five thousand tonnes. Rs 2.46 billion. Rs 37,580 per tonne — 2.2 times the Singapore spot price. The war explains part of that premium. The emergency explains more. But a defensible all-in delivered cost for Mauritius in this market is 50 to 00 per tonne. Mauritius paid 11. The gap of 00 to 50 per tonne — multiplied across 65,000 tonnes — is Rs 900 million to Rs 1.05 billion that the press conference did not explain and the market does not justify. That gap may have an innocent explanation. But an institution that paid Rs 12 million to a fraudster with no corrective procedures, awarded Rs 5 billion to a developer who built nothing, and has a board that was chaired by the current minister in 2010 when it approved a contract for bulbs that were never delivered — that institution does not get the benefit of the doubt on an unexplained Rs 1 billion premium. It gets an audit. The six questions in this article are not hostile. They are the minimum that Rs 2.46 billion of public money demands from any government that asks its citizens to trust it with the lights.