News Desk
MALE’ — The press release from the Adhaalath Party read like a straightforward act of generosity. Twenty fully funded undergraduate scholarships to a university in Malaysia, open to underprivileged Maldivian youth aged 17 to 23. Tuition covered. Living expenses included. Degrees in data science, business and education. Applications to be submitted directly to the party office.
What it did not say was that the scholarships are funded by the Albukhary Foundation, established by Malaysian billionaire Syed Mokhtar Albukhary, and that routing foreign-funded educational opportunities through a registered domestic political party sits in a part of Maldivian law that nobody has yet had to look at very carefully.
Transparency advocates in Male’ are now looking at it carefully.
The Political Parties Act is clear enough on cash. Article 41(b) of Statute No. 4/2013 explicitly prohibits parties from accepting financial aid or donations from foreign governments, international organisations or foreign nationals. The problem is that twenty international university scholarships are not cash. No money enters the Adhaalath Party’s treasury. The foundation pays the university. The party picks the students.
“Our laws were written to stop suitcases of cash coming across the border to fund campaign rallies,” said a Maldivian constitutional lawyer, speaking without attribution. “What we are seeing now is the weaponisation of non-monetary assets. Twenty international university degrees represent an immense financial value. Legally, does an in-kind educational endowment constitute a donation? The law is dangerously silent.”
The Elections Commission has no explicit statutory mechanism to flag the transaction as it currently stands. The Adhaalath Party maintains the scheme is purely humanitarian.
The question of whether the arrangement is legal matters less, in some respects, than the question of why a foreign foundation would choose to route educational opportunities through a political party at all, rather than through the Ministry of Higher Education or an independent scholarship body.
The answer is legible to anyone who has watched Maldivian politics for more than a week. In a country where thousands of young people compete for limited places in higher education abroad, the ability to hand out life-changing international scholarships is not merely charitable. It is political. The party that controls the application process, evaluates the socioeconomic circumstances of applicants and makes the selections becomes a gatekeeper. The recipients and their families remember who opened the door.
That dynamic, critics argue, allows foreign wealth to quietly subsidise a political party’s community relations strategy, building grassroots loyalty at no cost to the party itself and no visible breach of any rule.
Other democracies have spent years closing exactly this kind of gap.
In the United Kingdom, the Political Parties, Elections and Referendums Act 2000 defines a political donation explicitly to include money, property, goods or services provided for the benefit of a party, whether free or at a discount. A foreign foundation routing exclusive scholarships through a British political party would be intercepted immediately as an impermissible non-cash donation.
Australia, after a series of foreign interference scandals, rewrote its laws to ban foreign gifts covering property, services and any tangible benefit. Any domestic entity acting on behalf of a foreign principal must now register publicly, exposing institutional arrangements of precisely this kind.
In the United States, the Federal Election Campaign Act prohibits foreign nationals from contributing anything of value, directly or indirectly, in connection with any election. The Federal Election Commission has consistently interpreted that phrase to include non-monetary, in-kind contributions.
Across Asia, the picture is similar. Singapore’s Foreign Interference (Countermeasures) Act, passed in 2021, eliminated the distinction between cash and non-cash foreign support entirely. Under the Act, providing property, services or facilities to a politically significant person or entity outside commercial terms constitutes a prohibited foreign donation. A foreign university routing free degree places exclusively through a Singaporean political party would trigger immediate action.
India’s Foreign Contribution Regulation Act is among the strictest in Asia. Foreign contributions are defined to include the donation, delivery or transfer of any article, currency or foreign security by a foreign source. If a foundation abroad wishes to fund scholarships for Indian students, it cannot hand the selection process to a political party. The funds must go through non-political educational trusts registered with the Ministry of Home Affairs. Doing otherwise carries criminal penalties.
There is a particular irony in the geography of this arrangement. The foundation funding the scholarships is Malaysian. Malaysia has spent years grappling with the consequences of foreign money and private foundations flowing into its own political system, most prominently through the 1MDB scandal, which implicated political figures at the highest level and led to one of the largest kleptocracy prosecutions in history.
Malaysia is now debating its own political funding legislation to explicitly ban foreign donations. In the meantime, one of its major private foundations is providing scholarships to students in the Maldives via a political party, in a country whose laws were not written to catch it.
The dual blind spot is precise. Malaysia has no strict outbound controls on private educational philanthropy. The Maldives has no inbound controls on in-kind political benefits. The arrangement fits neatly into the gap between them.
The Adhaalath Party has a long history of entering coalitions rather than contesting power alone. It has aligned with governments of different political stripes over the years, lending its organisational base and religious credibility to whichever arrangement serves its interests at a given moment. It occupies a specific and influential lane in Maldivian politics, combining religious conservatism with community-level organising that extends across the atolls. Its ability to distribute something as valuable as a fully funded foreign degree to young constituents, with applications managed through its own email address, strengthens exactly the kind of grassroots ties that translate into votes regardless of which coalition it finds itself in.
None of that is proof of wrongdoing. The party may be entirely sincere in its stated humanitarian intent. But the mechanism it has chosen, and the legal framework that does not quite reach it, raises questions that go beyond the Adhaalath Party itself.
If the Elections Commission continues to measure political finance only in rufiyaa deposited into party accounts, the gap between what the law prohibits and what it permits will remain open. As other democracies have learned, sometimes at considerable cost, political capital does not always arrive in cash.
