{"id":766,"date":"2011-01-28T07:01:56","date_gmt":"2011-01-28T07:01:56","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/mauritiustimes.com\/mt\/2011\/01\/28\/paramanund-soobarah-4\/"},"modified":"2020-04-15T19:35:11","modified_gmt":"2020-04-15T15:35:11","slug":"paramanund-soobarah-4","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.mauritiustimes.com\/mt\/paramanund-soobarah-4\/","title":{"rendered":"Another Mari Deal?\u00a0"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><span style=\"color: #000080;\"><strong>By Paramanund Soobarah<\/strong><\/span><!--more--><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"color: #000000;\">And the Medpoint Clinic at the centre of it! This clinic is surely fated to go down in our history as a monument to actions of the powerful, as the Chateau du R\u00e9duit did. (It was built by a Governor for him to be closer to his mistress in Moka, as he considered that his official residence Chateau de Mon Plaisir at Pamplemousses was too far away for his purposes; he nearly drove the colony bankrupt in the process.) The Medpoint Clinic gave us the Medpoint Agreement, which in turn gave us the power sharing agreement \u201c\u00e0 l\u2019israelienne\u201d and the Presidential powers \u201c\u00e0 l\u2019indienne\u201d thereby demolishing those very constitutional powers that, way back in 1983, saved Prime Minister Anerood Jugnauth when he was being forced out of office by his erstwhile \u2018friends\u2019.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"color: #000000;\">The government spawned by the power sharing agreement gave us the famous \u2018Illovo Deal\u2019 \u2013 a real \u201cMari Deal\u201d, as it was dubbed by its progenitor.\u00a0 Its legal intricacies were so advanced that the progenitor had to go to outside consultants to seek cover for it. But what goes round comes round. Now the progenitor of that deal has himself found the latest Medpoint deal to be the \u201cscandale du si\u00e8cle\u201d!<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"color: #000000;\">We saw nothing in the electoral programme of the \u201cAlliance de l\u2019Avenir\u201d about building or acquiring new hospital accommodation in the country. We have not seen any public expressions of need for a clinic, but given the shortage of accommodation that the provision of free health service generates in this country a case for it can always be made retrospectively.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"color: #000000;\">No transaction becomes \u201ctransparent\u201d merely by being called so. We hope that the Director of Audit will look into this matter and do his duty with the same zeal that his counterparts in India, Canada, the US and other self-respecting democracies do.<\/span><\/p>\n<hr \/>\n<p><span style=\"color: #008080;\"><em>* Published in print edition on 28 January 2011<\/em><\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>By Paramanund Soobarah<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":37,"featured_media":6560,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[25],"tags":[19964,20539,284,3808,3429,787,2300],"class_list":["post-766","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-politics","tag-mari-deal","tag-alliance-de-lavenir","tag-anerood-jugnauth","tag-director-of-audit","tag-illovo-deal","tag-medpoint","tag-paramanund-soobarah"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/www.mauritiustimes.com\/mt\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/12\/MT-Logokk.jpg?fit=1200%2C880&ssl=1","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p8QzSF-cm","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.mauritiustimes.com\/mt\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/766","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.mauritiustimes.com\/mt\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.mauritiustimes.com\/mt\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.mauritiustimes.com\/mt\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/37"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.mauritiustimes.com\/mt\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=766"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.mauritiustimes.com\/mt\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/766\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.mauritiustimes.com\/mt\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/6560"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.mauritiustimes.com\/mt\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=766"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.mauritiustimes.com\/mt\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=766"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.mauritiustimes.com\/mt\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=766"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}