Mauritius has been demanding £800million a year and ‘billions of pounds in reparations’ as part of the beleaguered Chagos Islands talks, it emerged today.
Sir Keir Starmer has been facing calls to abandon his surrender of the archipelago after Mauritius’ new government rejected a proposed deal and started demanding more money.
Downing Street has refused to reveal how much it has offered to pay Mauritius for a 99-year lease of the crucial Anglo-American military base on Diego Garcia, the largest of the Chagos atolls.
But a source familiar with the talks told the Sunday Times: ‘They wanted crazy money.
‘They were talking £800million a year for as long as we wanted to keep the base there, plus billions of pounds in reparations.’
Sources close to David Lammy, the current Foreign Secretary, said UK negotiators have never ‘considered’ paying these amounts. But they did not deny that they have ever been demanded.
And they refused to say how close to the demands that they have settled, simply saying that the proposed deal was ‘underpinned by a financial package which will support a new era of economic partnership between the UK and Mauritius’.
Critics of surrendering sovereignty of the archipelago fear Labour is trying to rush a deal before Donald Trump re-enters the White House.
Diego Garcia, part of the Chagos Islands. Mauritius has been demanding £800million a year and ‘billions of pounds in reparations’ as part of the beleaguered Chagos Islands talks, it emerged today
Sir Keir Starmer (pictured) has been facing calls to abandon his surrender of the archipelago after Mauritius’ new government rejected a proposed deal and started demanding more money
Protesters voicing their opposition to the deal outside Parliament. Downing Street has refused to reveal how much it has offered to pay Mauritius for a 99-year lease of the crucial Anglo-American military base on Diego Garcia, the largest of the Chagos atolls
The president-elect’s pick for secretary of state, Marco Rubio, has warned that the deal posed ‘a serious threat’ to US national security by handing over the islands to a country allied with China.
Last week new Mauritian leader, Navinchandra Ramgoolam, had a phone call with outgoing US Secretary of State Antony Blinken, who is also keen to get the deal across the line.
The prime minister told his MPs afterwards: ‘I made him understand that we do not agree with certain things contained in the agreement concluded on October 3 by the former Mauritian prime minister and informed him that we have made a counter-proposal which will be transmitted to him.’
Days earlier his deputy had suggested that Mauritius is demanding more money to allow the continued operation of the base on Diego Garcia.
Mauritius’s deputy prime minister Paul Berenger told constituents: ‘This base existed on our land, on our territory… but not only it is [about] our sovereignty.
The British Indian Ocean Territory (BIOT) or Chagos Islands (formerly the Oil Islands) is an overseas territory of the United Kingdom situated in the Indian Ocean, halfway between Africa and Indonesia
Diego Garcia, the largest island in the Chagos archipelago
‘There are some things you can’t accept if you’re a true patriot. They are trying to make us sign and they are quibbling on a small amount.’
The Labour government insists the deal is not dead and that the new Mauritian administration is willing to do a deal.
A Foreign Office spokesman said: ‘An amount this high has not been considered at any point in negotiations between the UK and Mauritius.’
Talks were started by the previous Tory government, but a deal was never reached because ministers at the time were unwilling to agree terms.
A source said: ‘There wasn’t any feeling among us that there was a win for us out of it. Hence it not happening.
‘We already knew it had a horrible stink attached.’
[Notigroup Newsroom in collaboration with other media outlets, with information from the following sources]
