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Civil Court orders DRP to pay its Rf 510,497 bill with Island Aviation Services

The Civil Court has ordered the  main opposition Dhivehi Rayyithunge Party (DRP), led by MP Ahmed Thasmeen Ali, to pay Island Aviation Services Rf 510,497 (US$39,727).

Judge Abdul Sameer gave the party one month to repay the debt.

In June 2010 the DRP was given 13 days by the Civil Court to complete an examination of documentation and invoices from Island Aviation Services, after the party claimed it needed more time and requested an extension.

In the previous hearing held on the case, the DRP’s lawyer appealed for more time to examine the documentation and invoices presented by the national airline. Island Aviation Services had contended that the DRP was trying to delay the payment as long as it could, as there was no dispute that a payment was pending.

Citing Island Aviation Services’ annual audit report, local newspaper Haveeru reported that on August 21, 2008, ahead of the Presidential election, Island Aviation Services provided the DRP a credit limit of Rf 100,000 which was due to be repaid within 15 days.

However, the Rf 100,000 rose to more than Rf 800,000 (US$62,256) and DRP had not paid the balance after four months, Haveeru reported.

DRP MP Ahmed Nihan said today that the party was unable to pay the debt because of “difficulties” relating to its financial condition.

”But the DRP will always follow the courts of law,” said Nihan. ”We have always raised our voice for others to follow the courts, and the DRP [itself] will definitely follow the court [ruling].”

He said that he was unsure about the reason for the delay in settling the debt.

DRP leader Ahmed Thasmeen Ali was not responding to calls at time of press.

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Fire extinguished in Aaa Sahara cemetery

A fire in a building of the Aaa Sahara cemetery in the Machangoalhi district of Male’ has damaged equipment, reports Haveeru.

The cemetary’s staff accomodation block caught fire yesterday, police said, and was extinguished by the Maldives National Defence Force (MNDF) firefighters.

Nobody was injured and police are investigating the incident.

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Libyan army guns down demonstrators, UK backs away from Bahrain

Soldiers in Libya and Bahrain have fired on demonstrators as authorities try to quell growing unrest, triggered after protesters toppled 30 year autocrats in Tunisia and Egypt.

Troops in Libya reportedly shot and killed at least 12 mourners in the city of Benghazi, after a group tried to storm a military barracks and throw firebombs into the compound on the way to the funeral. Opposition groups claimed up to 60 were killed, while one activist told the BBC that the regime was releasing prisoners from jail to attack the demonstrators.

The BBC reported that troops used mortars and 14.5mm heavy machine guns to repress the civilians, while Al-Jazeera reported that hospitals were running out of blood needed for emergency transfusions.

Al-Jazeera also reported an account from a cleric in Benghazi, who witnessed a tank crushing two people in a car. Libyan President Muammar Abu Minyar al-Gaddafi has also imposed a news blackout on the country and banned journalists from entering.

Analysts have further suggested that the human cost of an Egyptian-style uprising in Libya could be far higher, given the military apparent enthusiasm for firing on its own population.

Bahrain’s military meanwhile shot and killed at least one demonstrator and wounded 50 more, during a funeral procession for four people killed in earlier unrest.

Rising tensions and ongoing demonstrations suggest that King Hamad bin Issa al-Khalifa’s gift of US$3000 on February 12 to every family in the poverty-stricken Gulf nation has failed to satisfy protesters.

The UK, which has previously supported regimes in Bahrain and Libya, announced it was withdrawing licenses authorising the sale on arms to both countries.

The UK’s Ministry of Defence has trained more than 100 Bahraini army officers in the past five years at its military college in Sandhurst, reports the UK’s Guardian newspaper, while the country is also a base for the US fifth fleet.

UN High Commissioner for Human Rights Navi Pillay has meanwhile condemned the shooting of protesters in Algeria, Bahrain, Iran, Iraq, Libya and Yemen, and described the entire region as “boiling with anger.”

“At the root of this anger is decades of neglect of people’s aspirations to realise not only civil and political rights, but also economic, social and cultural rights,” Navi said.

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Grenade cache found on Dhaalu Atoll

Children playing on the uninhabited island of Kadimma in Dhaalu Atoll yesterday discovered a cache of explosives hidden in the bushes.

Police and the Maldives National Defence Force (MNDF) have not revealed the nature of the explosives, however images in local media revealed the ordinance to be grenades of modern appearance.

The children were attending a picnic on the island when the discovery was made. Following the find, a second group of islanders told radio station SunFM that they found eight such explosives on the island and threw them away.

Police Sergent Abdul Muhusin said the MNDF was investigating the case and that police could not comment on the issue.

MNDF Major Abdul Raheem told SunFM that an expert was now investigating the explosives.

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Employ recovering addicts, President urges big business

State-owned corporations and large businesses should help rehabilitate drug addicts back into society through active recruitment, President Mohamed Nasheed has said during his weekly radio address.

The President noted the state-owned construction firm Works Corporation Limited had employed 15 recovering addicts in its Thilafushi precast yard, and that 11 of the 15 had successfully completed the program. The company had now taken on an additional 25 young people to boost the government’s drug rehabilitation efforts, he said.

Addicts, he said, were isolated from their families and society as a result of their addiction, and such programs could return them to the community.

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No injuries reported in Male’ cemetery fire

No injuries have been recorded following a fire that damaged equipment and a cemetery building yesterday in Machangoalhi, Male’, local new reports have said.

Police authorities have confirmed that the blaze struck a second floor block used as staff accommodation at the “Aaa Sahara” cemetery, according to Haveeru.

The Maldives National Defence Force’s (MNDF) Fire and Rescue department dealt with the blaze, whilst police are now investigating the possible causes of the fire, the report added.

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Somali piracy spreading to Asian waters, says US military official

A high ranking US Military official has claimed that piracy originating from Somalia is expanding into Asia, potentially leading to “problems” for a nation like the Maldives, according to news reports.

Miadhu reported that Admiral Robert Willard, who has recently toured the Maldives in his role as commander of the 300,000 strong Pacific Command, claimed President Mohamed Nasheed had expressed concerns that pirates whether abandoned or lost during, had been landing in the Maldives.

Several dinghies containing Somali nationals were stranded in the Maldives last year. Defence personnel discovered a bullet casing in one of the later dinghies.

A recent Minivan News investigation found that although there was no evidence that national interests in the Maldives had been threatened so far by piracy, coastal security authorities and experts believed the country could potentially become a target for pirate vessels increasingly forced away from African waters by the naval presence in the Gulf of Aden.

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LDCs meeting in Delhi this weekend

The government of India is holding a ministerial conference for Least Developed Countries (LDCs) this weekend.

The Maldives will be represented by State Minister of Foreign Affairs, Ahmed Naseem, despite graduating to a Middle Income Country in January.

The number of LDC’s has increased from 25 in 1971 to 48 in 2011, noted the Indian High Commission to the Maldives in a press statement. All countries are expected to be sending their permanent representatives, while 35 ministers are attending the conference in Delhi.

“Sustained global growth and stability will remain a dream if economies of the LDCs continue to be underdeveloped and their natural and human resources remain untapped preventing their overall socio-economic advancement,” the High Commission statement noted.

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Mid-market appeal amongst 2011 tourism challenges

As a growing number of Asian markets like India begin flocking to the Maldives for their holiday escapes, the country’s tourism minister believes the government’s goal of providing more middle-market beds to “compliment” premium resort properties will boost the industry in the long run.

As the country continues to look at potential revamps for how it markets itself in the tourism market, Dr Mariyam Zulfa, Minister for Tourism, Arts and Culture, told Minivan News that the Maldives risked being seen as a destination with “too many” premium beds.

However, Zulfa said that in looking to diversify towards more mid-market tourism, the issue of replacing the country’s current “Sunny Side of Life” ad slogan remained under industry consultation – including over whether it should be changed at all.

Zulfa’s comments were made as new findings published by the Pacific Asia Travel Association (PATA) and the Nielsen Company found the Maldives was among several destinations like China, Indonesia and Bangladesh to be attracting increasing interest from Indian travellers.

“The diversification in destinations indicates a greater sense of adventurism and discovery that should be heartening for tourism as a whole, and a clear symptom of a confident Indian consumer mimicking their country’s confidence and prominence,” Neilson Company Executive Director Surekha Poddar stated in the report.

“The Indian traveller is set to become a prized possession as potential spending power and disposition to travel to new countries increases.”

Zulfa said that with income levels in nations like China and India growing in general on a daily basis, the Maldives was beginning to see “exponential growth” in the number of visitors from both of these markets.

“The government has introduced a mid-market policy focusing on three to four star resorts,” she said. “These are being introduced to complement the premium beds we have here.”

Although not willing to speculate if these tourism developments were directly related, Zulfa said that more middle market properties was seen as a move that would be cater to a changing customer demographic.

“Premium beds alone are not suitable for visitors from the South of Asia. We need to look at how to reach out to them,” she said. “These tourists have very different vacation habits to more established markets like Europe.”

Slogan talks

Zulfa claimed that opinion was currently divided on the direction to take on marketing the Maldives to travellers around the world, particularly the merits of changing “the sunny side of life” slogan – one that has been in service for eleven years.

“We will be having informal discussions whilst we will be at the Internationale Tourismus Börse (ITB) – a tourism trade show being held between March 9-13 in Berlin,” she said. “Right now, we have two levels of feedback, one of which is that it [still] works.”

Zulfa added that if a decision was taken to keep the slogan, it would perhaps need to be reintegrated or redesigned with a “more modern” aesthetic.

“There is another reasoning that suggests that although the wording is OK, it is too general,” she said. “The slogan is now 11 years old and perhaps to fill the premium beds we have, a new slogan may be needed to reinvigorate the market. This will be discussed during consultations at the ITB.”

Zulfa said that work was nonetheless continuing on a Maldivian marketing strategy despite uncertainty on the final product.

Mohamed ‘Sim’ Ibrahim, Secretary General of the Maldives Association of Tourism Industry (MATI), said that MATI did not itself have an opinion on the final outcome of any possible slogan revamp. However, Ibrahim said that MATI hoped to see greater study and research into what the industry itself would prefer to see in terms of branding and marketing.

“We don’t think enough is being done, [in terms of studying the slogan issue],” he said. “We would like to see more cooperation from resorts, airlines, travel companies and other major stakeholders in the Maldives tourism industry.”

From the outset, 2011 is proving to be a year of change for Maldivian tourism, with the implementation of Tourism Goods and Services Tax (GST) on January 1 that placed an additional charge of 3.5 percent on a host of services supplied by the travel industry.

Mohamed said that although he believed that adoption of the GST among service operators had gone “smoothly”, MATI held “serious issues” with the tax related to payments and other technical issues.

The MATI secretary general said he was unable to provide more details about the concerns at present, but added that the association was looking to hold a meeting with resort chains over the issues.

Zulfa claimed that the implementation of the GST had so far gone well for the industry, with no major complaints received concerning the charges.

“Most operators in the tourism industry agree that the 3.5 percent GST is a very reasonable amount to pay,” she said.

“This is a way that more people can equitably benefit from tourism.”

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