Residents, not guests: Ayla, Henley and the Pearl visa

This story was reported in collaboration with the Organised Crime and Corruption Reporting Project (OCCRP), which published a companion feature on the Maldives’ residency plans today.

In Fodhdhoo, nobody is quite sure what is emerging out of the massive lagoon up north.

"What we’ve heard is that some of the wealthiest people in the world are investing in this place," said Abdulla Abbas, who manages a guesthouse on the island in Noonu atoll. He has heard "the surrounding development will come with all the facilities" that wealthy residents would need.

"I heard there’s going to be casinos and clubs built here when all of this is finished. It’s going to be huge," said a speedboat captain from Fodhdhoo. Another man was more sceptical: "Apparently there’s going to be a hospital built there, too. But so far, we haven't gotten anything out of it, no jobs for any locals, nothing."

The Dhigufaru lagoon and Dhekenanfaru island north of Fodhdhoo were leased to a Swiss investor in late 2022. The resort development planned on 11 reclaimed islands was called Ayla Maldives. On 31 December last year, the current government designated the revamped Project Ayla as the Maldives' first "sustainable township," a new kind of special economic zone where foreigners will be able to buy long leases on luxury homes.

"It’s going to be developed Monaco-style, each of the reclaimed islands will have a villa for a resident," said Abbas, the guesthouse manager.

That would be new. Foreigners have been able to buy resort villas in the Maldives since at least 2010. But they remain tourists whose lease cannot outlast the resort's. The resort management runs the villa when the owner is away. 

Ayla is for people who come to stay rather than visit. It was announced as a renewable energy-powered township with homes, a hospital, a wellness centre and farms "aimed at attracting high-net-worth individuals and families to reside in the Maldives." The Maldives Pearl Residence programme, a residency-by-investment scheme developed with the global firm Henley & Partners, "connects large-scale investment and development with long-term residency," Economic Minister Mohamed Saeed said at Ayla's groundbreaking in January. The government's Pearl Residence website has since invited investors to "secure permanent residence".

The same government spent the past three weeks defending a much larger project at Rasmalé, an island created south of Malé as President Dr Mohamed Muizzu's answer to the capital's housing crisis. Rasmalé has dominated the news since the deal was signed with Abu Dhabi's Eagle Hills, which plans to develop 8,800 properties on nearly half of the reclaimed land and has been inviting buyers to "make Maldives your new home."  

Ayla, 188 kilometres north of the capital, and the partnership with Henley, have attracted far less notice over the past year, largely staying out of public and media attention. 

The Maldives has long welcomed foreign capital but not foreign neighbours, a line that successive governments have drawn thinner with residency visa schemes tied to real estate investments. A 99-year lease that resets with every sale or inheritance, as first promised by Eagle Hills, is at the heart of the Rasmalé row. Critics say "infinite resets" circumvent the constitutional ban on foreign ownership, unconvinced by Infrastructure Minister Dr Abdulla Muththalib's insistence that the state will decide "who owns and who enters." Purchasing a Rasmalé property "would never lead to permanent residency or citizenship," he wrote on Monday, noting that buyers would be eligible for the corporate residence visa introduced in 2015.

But while the state might exercise sovereignty over the territory, "the more relevant issue concerns who exercises effective control over economic activity, governance, and the distribution of benefits,” said Salma Fikry, a governance specialist who has tracked the control of Maldivian land for years.

"Systems based on extensive long-term leasing frequently evolve beyond their original scope. Lease durations are extended, additional rights are granted, and economic dependence on external capital increases pressure for further concessions," she told the Maldives Independent.

Leases running for decades "can confer many of the practical benefits associated with ownership, including exclusive possession, transferability, inheritance rights, and long-term economic control," she noted.

Henley & Partners pitched the residency programme to the government, which formalised it as a "private sector initiated proposal", the economic development ministry told the Maldives Independent in August.

The visa programme “remains subject to completion of the legislative and regulatory framework” with "final investment categories, residency term, renewal arrangements, and associated conditions" to be determined. 

The ministry withheld the partnership agreement with Henley & Partners, including any addenda, citing a discretionary exemption in the right to information law that lets an institution decline to release commercially confidential information where disclosure would cause "irrevocable damage" to a third party's business interests.

"The program is being developed with a robust multi-layered due diligence framework incorporating international screening, financial and reputational assessment, and screening by relevant government national security and regulatory agencies as part of the due diligence process," the ministry said.

In a near-identical written response to the Maldives Independent, Henley described "a multi-layered due diligence framework incorporating international screening, independent background verification reports, financial and reputational assessment, together with screening by the relevant Maldivian national security and regulatory authorities."

In response to an RTI request, the Attorney General's Office said in July that the Pearl Residence bill was still at the policy stage. The programme was being developed under an agreement between the economic ministry and Henley & Partners Immigration Services DMCC, a company based in the United Arab Emirates, it said.

At a press conference in April, Economic Minister Saeed said a dedicated Pearl Residence bill had been drafted by the AG Office and would "soon be submitted to parliament for approval".

The agreement with Henley was signed at a business forum in Singapore in July 2025. Henley said it would "work closely with the government to build an investor visa framework specifically linked to real estate acquisition."

Henley, whose chairman Christian Kälin has been dubbed the "Passport King," has designed residency and citizenship schemes from Malta to the Caribbean, several of which have been mired in scandal, as OCCRP has extensively reported. 

Asked about the past controversies, Henley told the Maldives Independent there was “no factual basis for treating a collection of historic and disputed allegations concerning different jurisdictions and periods as evidence, or as a way to wrongly infer that due diligence under the new Maldives Pearl Residence program will be inadequate.” 

Its role in the Maldives’ programme will be to “support application processing, administration, and the preparation of recommendations,” with the Maldives government deciding on applications. 

In an op-ed in December, Saeed cited estimates that the programme could bring in more than US$1 billion. The ministry said the figure was based on "preliminary program modelling".

The government will not pay "any fees or remuneration from public funds for the design, marketing, implementation, management or operation of the programme," Henley said, though the firm may "separately charge clients" for help with applications. 

"Under the program structure, fees paid by applicants may be used to fund the administration and operation of the Program Office, including remuneration of service providers engaged in implementation and management," the economic ministry said.

Asked whether buyers are told they are buying a home or a lease, Henley said the terms "will be clearly disclosed to prospective purchasers in the relevant contractual documentation".

Henley, which markets the scheme as "the first of its kind in the Maldives," now lists it as launching in the second half of 2026, a slip from the first-half window it advertised earlier and delayed even further from the April target initially set by the government. 

In July, Hulhumalé South MP Dr Ahmed Shamheed from the opposition Maldivian Democratic Party filed a resolution calling on the government to halt "the policy of selling permanent residence permits to foreigners" and to disclose the agreement signed with Henley on 1 July 2025.  

"We're seeing that this is being implemented without a legal framework," he told the Maldives Independent at the time. "What they're getting, what they're not getting, which rights, none of this has been shared with the People's Majlis."

The Majlis, where the ruling party controls a supermajority, rejected the resolution in August. During the debate, Majority Leader Ibrahim Falah condemned it as an attempt to "mislead the public" with "false information." After revising the immigration law in 2020, the MDP government had granted corporate residency visas to 168 people "to reside here permanently," 153 of whom still live in the Maldives, he claimed, criticising the investment threshold of US$250,000 as too low and contrasting it to the US$500 million set for SEZ townships.  

Project Ayla involves neither citizenship nor permanent residency, Falah insisted. "That's not a permanent visa, not citizenship," he said. "However, for people who come to make such large investments, how can they go in and out of the country once a month?"

The MDP's leadership is not opposed to residency-by-investment in principle.

"As a general rule, I am not against the idea, the concept. What I'm concerned about is whether the safeguards are in place or not," former economic development minister Fayyaz Ismail told the Maldives Independent. When the MDP government proposed the US$250,000 visa, Fayyaz said Saeed and the then opposition had claimed it was "for bringing Indians to the Maldives". Villa sales with residency are "a good thing for the Maldives, as diversification in addition to tourism," he said.

Fayyaz and Shamheed are both seeking the MDP's ticket to contest the 2028 presidential election.

Former President Mohamed Nasheed, the MDP's chairman, said in August that residency programmes would open up the "opportunity for a different kind of tourism." 

In 2024, Nasheed received the Global Citizen Award from the Andan Foundation set up by Henley's chairman Christian Kälin. The former president sits on on the foundation's advisory committee. Asked about the relationship, he told the Maldives Independent: "This is not at all accurate and I don't understand why you are going on about it. Residency programme is a good programme. I suggest that you remove all the articles on Henley."

Nasheed "played no role" in the firm's engagement with the Maldives government, which had been "conducted exclusively with the current administration", Henley told the Maldives Independent.

The firm's engagement with Nasheed "has been in connection with his longstanding leadership and advocacy on climate vulnerability and climate finance, including through the Climate Vulnerable Forum, which he founded in 2009 and subsequently served as its first Secretary-General," the firm said, noting that the 2024 award had been conferred in recognition of his leadership and advocacy on behalf of climate-vulnerable nations.  

"The fact that former President Nasheed remains an esteemed member of the Andan Foundation’s Advisory Committee despite being in political opposition to the current Maldivian administration, with which Henley & Partners is working on the Pearl Residence programme, further demonstrates that the two relationships are entirely separate and unrelated."

"It’s one of the top tourist destinations in the world with a strong brand. People go there for vacation, but now the government wants them to buy a second home and receive residency,” Henley’s chairman Kälin told an Israeli journalist during a December 2025 visit to Israel. The interview was republished on his personal website.

"We expect wealthy people from around the world to buy additional homes there, and we hope many Israelis will do so."

Israeli passport holders have been barred from entering the Maldives since April 2025. 

Asked about the comments, Henley said they were "made in the context of discussing the programme's potential international appeal and were obviously not a statement regarding the eligibility of any particular nationality." The programme "does not create exemptions" from entry restrictions, it added.

Opposition to the separate Rasmalé project has meanwhile centred on the claim that it will become a Jewish settlement. Referring to the Eagle Hills chairman Mohamed Alabbar's alleged ties to Israel, former President Abdulla Yameen alleged at a rally on 28 September that Israelis would be brought to live in Rasmalé, accusing President Muizzu of weeping for Palestine while selling land to Jews.

'Marz' Ahmed Saleem, an MDP national council member who filed a complaint over the deal with the Anti-Corruption Commission, alleged an "agenda" to sell land to wealthy Israelis. On Sunday, Yameen called Eagle Hills "a depraved bunch exploiting a morally bankrupt regime" and repeated his claim that the project would create a "Jewish settlement".  

Homeland Security Minister Ali Ihusaan called Yameen's claim "a blatant distortion of facts and a disgraceful attempt to exploit religious sentiments for political gain". Muththalib accused those spreading it of "abusing the Palestinian struggle and Maldivians' sentiments to score political points".

But Muththalib also acknowledged that the ban "covers Israeli passports, not Israeli citizens." About one in 10 Israelis hold a second nationality, by his estimate, and can enter on it "because Immigration cannot verify dual citizenship at the border" – a gap that "exists today at every resort in the country". For Rasmalé, he promised that buyers and their beneficial owners would have to declare every nationality they hold or have held, that Israeli nationals and Israeli-controlled companies would be barred from the whole ownership chain, and that a false declaration would void the lease. 

Opponents of the Rasmalé deal have since called a three-hour social media protest for Thursday under hashtags including #EagleHillsOut, #AlabbarOut and #MvAgainstZionists.

The allegations draw on Alabbar's record. In 2005, as chairman of Emaar, he met Israeli leaders in Tel Aviv to discuss buying structures in Gaza settlements ahead of Israel's withdrawal. After the UAE normalised relations with Israel in 2020, he called for closer ties between Emiratis and Israelis. In 2021, an Israeli business daily named him among the donors to an Israeli food-aid programme. 

On the SEZ township under development in Noonu atoll, MP Shamheed argued that "a geographic location of the Maldives has been carved up and handed over to a particular developer" with "all of the elements of a state" such as banks, schools, hospitals.

“Money laundering, terrorism financing, and what they do with banks set up there, we don’t know any of this. We have very few resources in the Maldives. We’re talking about billionaires, and we wouldn’t know if the world’s big mafia gangs come and operate there,”  he told the Maldives Independent.

"We don’t know whether people who are way more sophisticated and much richer than our whole country would live there, or take control. And this is just one city. Apparently many such cities are to come, according to them. So this is the concern. The Maldives will get blacklisted. Usually those who come to invest in such places come for tax havens and money laundering, for all such disreputable matters."

Shamheed's resolution referred to section 79 of the SEZ Act, under which it prevails over 15 other laws – among them the tourism, land, banking and tax laws – "in respect of all matters relating to zones". The Act also says the constitution and Maldivian law "shall fully apply" to everything outside a zone's incentives, but makes the developer primarily responsible for seeing that the law is followed inside it.

But special economic zones "create economic and social spaces that are partially insulated from the institutions and accountability mechanisms that govern the rest of the country," said Salma.

A regulation on offshore banks in the zones bars disclosure of customers and their beneficial owners without a court order or the owner's consent. The Companies Act separately requires businesses to file records of beneficial owners – defined as persons holding not less than 25 per cent shares, voting rights or dividends – with the Registrar of Companies but there is no public searchable registry.

This lack of transparency creates "a significant accountability gap" where property ownerships inside SEZs is only known to the authorities, Ahmed Ahid Rasheed, whose five-year term as Information Commissioner ended in September, told the Maldives Independent.

"RTI exists so that the public can scrutinise how public resources such as land are being used and by whom. If the SEZ laws does not allow it, it is not a transparent one. It's a confidentiality framework," he said.

"The framework ought to require firstly a publicly searchable beneficial ownership register. Secondly, a public land ownership register for property inside SEZs. This should include who owns what, when it was acquired, and for how much. There is no principled reason that these information should not be publicly accessible. Us citizens have a right to know who is buying property in our country."

The Asia/Pacific Group on Money Laundering found last year that the Maldives had not assessed the risks posed by the companies that could operate in SEZs. The regional watchdog cited the government's own risk assessment that the country's real estate sector is “highly vulnerable” to money laundering. Responding to an RTI request from the Maldives Independent in July, the central bank and the Financial Intelligence Unit declined to say whether those risks have since been assessed or whether an assessment is under way. The bank also withheld proposed safeguards for offshore banking and trust services in the zones, describing them as "unadopted, un-operationalized, or exploratory". It suggested that releasing the information could threaten "market stability".

The economic ministry confirmed that foreign-registered companies will be allowed to buy leasehold properties in the Ayla zone. Investors, including foreign companies, "will be required to disclose information as required under the applicable regulatory regimes," it said.

Azza Mohamed, governance manager at Transparency Maldives, stressed the need for full transparency and genuine oversight to prevent the permissive conditions that enabled the theft of nearly US$90 million from the Maldives Marketing and Public Relations Corporation more than a decade ago. 

"Weak oversight already lets illicit funds move through formal and informal systems, and procurement gaps increase fraud risk in public institutions and state-owned enterprises," she explained.

"SEZ frameworks compound this. Relaxed regulations, tax incentives, and discretionary approvals without transparency create tax-haven-style conditions that mirror MMPRC’s pattern of corruption, embezzlement, money laundering, and hidden ownership. Proceeding without proper risk assessments opens blind spots where illicit funds and corruption can enter through legal changes and unchecked approvals."

But residence schemes carry far less risk than passport schemes, Kristin Surak, author of The Golden Passport: Global Mobility for Millionaires, told OCCRP. "You’re not getting a new citizenship, so the risk is much lower," she said. The vast majority of people who take up such schemes are "normal people" rather than politically exposed persons or alleged criminals, she said. 

Nonetheless, there will still be questions about where the money comes from, she said, "you still have to do background checks". Her advice to any small state selling residency was "strong due diligence so that the right people come through and that their money is clean" and to "make sure that the benefits stay in the country rather than being paid out in commissions to foreign service providers".

In Holhudhoo, Noonu atoll's second most populous island, "80 per cent of the money that enters the island's economy" now comes from Ayla, Velidhoo MP Mohamed Abbas told parliament in August. 

But Salma questioned the purported benefits for local communities. Luxury tourism has earned the country a fortune over five decades, yet the richest fifth of Maldivians receive about 38.5 per cent of national income and the poorest fifth 8.9 per cent, according to World Bank estimates. Townships, zones and large land deals "may collectively contribute to a gradual concentration of territorial and economic control in the hands of a relatively small group of political, corporate, and foreign actors", she warned.

The risk is that the ordinary Maldivian’s stake is "reduced to that of a wage earner, consumer, or observer within developments that are formally national but increasingly detached from local ownership and democratic control," Salma said.

Surak told OCCRP that such schemes "could be considered a form of global gentrification, where a country builds enclaves for wealthy people to come and benefit from the country". But the purchase and the spending that follows "could also be a significant source of revenue for the country. Small countries often have limited options in that regard."

Midhuam Saud, a commentator with a large following, argued in his blog this week that the Maldives is not "economically or institutionally ready to adopt this model at the scale currently being proposed". The government’s stated target is 35,000 foreign residents at Rasmalé alone, he noted. "The gap in purchasing power between these two groups would be enormous," he wrote. "To put it more bluntly, we risk becoming servants to the wealthy foreign residents we have invited into our own country."

Supporters of residency by investment point to Singapore and Dubai, but both had built strong institutions before they courted wealthy foreigners, Midhuam argued. "Singapore succeeded because it built the foundations of its development in the right order," he wrote. The Maldives "must first prioritise eliminating systemic corruption" then improve its citizens’ living standard before considering such programmes: "That is precisely why we must not get the order wrong."

Midhuam observed the same pattern in tourism, where Maldivians own only about a fifth of more than 100 resorts: "Foreign investors own the assets. Maldivians work for them."

When the Maldives Independent visited Dhigufaru in July, construction work was well under way on about half of the cluster of new islands reclaimed from the lagoon. About half stood empty. All the artificial islands were ringed with rock revetment, some with groynes, to stop the sand washing back into the sea. Several had been landscaped with replanted coconut palms. 

The largest plot, on the eastern side facing into the atoll, served as the project base. It had at least three cranes, blocks that appeared to house workers with more under construction and piles of aggregate and steel bars beside unopened shipping containers. At midday, workers and vehicles were busy across the site. A cargo vessel was unloading more containers at another island.

Most of the workers were Chinese, with some Bangladeshis and a few Maldivians, according to the guesthouse manager in Fodhdhoo, where they often visit.

Before reclamation, the lagoon was one of the atoll’s best spots for diving and snorkelling, residents said. "[Dhigufaru] lagoon has the most healthy reefs in the atoll," said Ali Shameem, a former president of the Kudafari island council. 

Dredging "kills the ecosystem in its entirety" and causes “irreversible harm” to marine life, said Humaida Abdul Ghafoor, an environmental activist with the Save Maldives campaign. "It also changes the currents, water movements, the hydrology. It also generates sediment, which becomes a killer," she said.

The environmental impact assessment for Project Ayla expected “significant impacts” from dredging and reclamation. Monitoring visits found the reef near the borrow areas in only fair condition with poor live coral cover. Reclamation was halted from 9 May to 10 June 2024, during a nationwide suspension for mass coral bleaching. Between July and September 2024, about 74 per cent of sedimentation readings at monitoring sites exceeded the Environmental Regulatory Authority's limit of 15 mg/cm² a day, levels a monitoring report said "may threaten surrounding marine ecosystems". By October 2025, with the large dredgers gone, the reef remained "poor to fair, reflecting previous large-scale reclamation activity".

Residents of Fodhdhoo said sediment plumes had reached nearby luxury resorts and complained that sand had been dredged from inside the atoll rather than outside it, which is cheaper for contractors but worsens the silt.

"All the palm trees here have been bought from different islands, brought here and replanted. They bought more than 4,000 palm trees, I heard," a Fodhdhoo resident said. 

The Dhigufaru lagoon, a large reef system covering about 745 hectares, was leased by President Ibrahim Mohamed Solih's administration through an unsolicited proposal. The investor chose the site and paid what then-economic minister Fayyaz called a "hugely higher" acquisition fee than a normal tender would have fetched, earmarked for land reclamation in the Giraavaru lagoon near Malé. The main party was Swiss with a partner from Scandinavia, as Fayyaz recalled. The deal was "just a normal lease" that "can be transferred like a normal tourism transfer lease". The MDP government never expected Ayla to become an SEZ, he told the Maldives Independent.

In April 2024, BluRock Ocean Investments Holding Ltd became a shareholder in the leaseholder Crystal Holdings. In March 2025, the SEZ Board of Investments gave Crystal Holdings an "initial permit" for a "sustainable township" in Noonu. Eight months later, parliament amended the SEZ Act to add a chapter of "sustainable townships" with specific tax incentives, including reduced income tax rates and exemptions on import duties for construction material. 

The Attorney General's Office denied consulting any foreign parties in drafting the township law. It had given no legal advice on whether townships or Pearl Residence conflict with the constitution, including on leasing state land and lagoons to foreign companies, it said.

The full SEZ permit for Project Ayla was granted in December. Muizzu designated Ayla the first township on 31 December. Groundbreaking followed on 29 January.

The president's guidance on the project was to ensure that "the vision BluRock presented at the outset was to be realised in its entirety," Saeed said at the ceremony. He called BluRock and Crystal Holdings "the pioneers of this new township model". Petar Krstic, Ayla's chief executive, called it "the single largest private sector investment in the history of the Maldives, nearly US$800 million".

Since then the project has kept changing shape. The seventh addendum to the environmental impact assessment (EIA) report in May described 21 islands and 364 rooms, including 73 villas on VIP, private and royal islands "designed as high-end residential-style villas offering maximum privacy and exclusivity".

An eighth addendum filed in August raised the count to 25 islands and islets, seeking to add small islets and a bridge linking a "Golf Island," a "Residence Island" and the Royal Island, which it would enlarge from 9.45 to 14.45 hectares and raise in parts to three metres above sea level “due to the changing product type”. According to the addendum, a "resort concept revision" awaits the tourism ministry's approval. The VIP islands, private islands and royal villa "will operate as a residence style development".

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The reclamation of 152 hectares with more than six million cubic metres of sand dredged from the seabed began in February 2024. The EIA filings put completion of the remaining work at December 2026, though the schedule attached to it runs to February 2027. Resort construction, under way since September 2025, is to continue until December 2028. At the groundbreaking, Krstic promised to open the township "in the summer of 2028".

BluRock, the Dubai-based shareholder, is now marketing it under a third name: The Laurel, 96 properties on 13 islands, with a golf course and a marina billed as the largest in the region. BluRock advertises The Laurel’s opening for 2027.

Saeed said at the groundbreaking ceremony that healthcare, education and training, community uplift and food security were built into the project. "These are not add-ons; they are conditions," he said. Krstic promised a hospitality academy "in partnership with a leading international institution", a "state-of-the-art medical facility" and at least 60 per cent renewable energy.

But none of the EIA reports and addenda mention the facilities required of a township by the revised SEZ law, including a hospital, hospitality school, farms or fish farms, housing and amenities for residents. Asked when those components would be built, the economic ministry said they were under development. "The operational license for the sustainable township will only be granted upon fulfilment of all the components as required," it said.

The latest filing was signed by Crystal Holdings' managing director Abdul Rahim Vattiyapuri Haja Mohideen. Crystal Holdings and BluRock did not respond to questions. 

Ayla is the first township, but not the only project selling homes to foreigners. At Rasmalé, Eagle Hills plans to develop about 500 hectares under a 99-year lease. The project would be governed by a real estate law still being drafted, Attorney General Ahmed Usham said.

A US$175 million "sustainable township" in Thaa Atoll was announced on 24 July by Blue Synergy Investments and Emerald Corporates through a press release placed in Indian media. However, the SEZ Act requires a minimum investment of US$500 million for sustainable township status. 

"The project developer has neither submitted an application for SEZ or Sustainable Township  designation, nor has any such approval or designation been granted by the Government to date," the economic ministry said. 

The tourism ministry's register of new developments lists more integrated resorts planned on lagoon plots. Several resorts in the pipeline include residences:

Before Ayla, the tax authority applied the tourism goods and services tax (T-GST) of 16 or 17 per cent to villa sales, which Fayyaz said "was a killer to develop that market". In June 2023, Solih's government proposed a four per cent tourism real estate tax instead. After the change of government in November 2023, Muizzu's attorney general withdrew the proposed changes to the tourism law.

A year later, the Supreme Court ruled in Bunny Holdings v MIRA that long-term villa leases fell outside the GST Act.

"It's not four percent," Fayyaz said. "In fact it's zero percent tax now."

The four per cent property transfer tax returned in the SEZ township amendment passed in November. In a township such as Ayla, the rate is one per cent on the first sale, two per cent on the second and four per cent on every sale after that. Township developers also pay five per cent income tax for 10 years and 10 per cent for the next decade. Profits on villa sales are exempt.

Saeed insisted at the groundbreaking that the incentives were "not about giving away public revenue". They were "targeted, conditional and time-bound", he said, and "core taxes, including goods and services tax, land lease rent and applicable sectoral levies, remain fully in place". 

"My understanding is they didn't want to give this to everyone," Fayyaz said. "So it's a hugely corrupt decision, I would say. Or a very negligent decision." If the MDP returns to power, it would honour binding contracts but bring in a tax on real estate tourism "across the board", he said.

Shamheed calculated that the state would only collect US$2,500 if a foreigner buys a US$250,000 property in Ayla. The MDP government's corporate visa rules required the money to sit in a Maldivian bank for five years, his resolution noted, whereas Pearl Residence spends the same sum on a developer's property. He called for residency-linked sales to pay at least the standard four per cent, plus a "residence programme levy", and for a 10-year bar on resale.

At Rasmalé, buyers will pay four per cent on every transfer, according to the infrastructure ministry. 

For Salma, the question is not the rate but the land. "We should not, as a country with exceptionally limited land resources, continue converting portions of our territory into long-term private enclaves without a clear national consensus regarding the long-term implications for sovereignty, resource control, and intergenerational equity," she said.

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