On 31 July 2026, the Mauritius Society of Authors sent its members a letter setting out exactly what it had collected that quarter, exactly what it had kept, and exactly what each member was owed. It is an unusually transparent document for a statutory collecting society on this continent to produce. Read against the numbers, it shows that of the 2,160 Mauritian rights holders who received a payment that round, 1,422 of them, nearly two in three, were paid less than 500 rupees, about eleven US dollars.
That same circular is the least contested fact in this story. Running alongside it, and reported separately by Mauritian press across fourteen months, is a second, much larger figure that MASA has not explained: roughly 95 million rupees, around two million US dollars, sitting in the society’s accounts with no agreed owner. The man who first said so publicly was removed as MASA’s president within seven months of taking office. An independent forensic audit into the money, ordered by the government, has been running since September 2026 and has not reported.
These are two different findings about the same organisation, documented from two different kinds of source, and this piece keeps them separate rather than merging them into one number, because no document checked here shows they are connected.
What MASA actually is, and what it collects#
The Mauritius Society of Authors is the island’s sole collective management organisation, operating under the Copyright Act 2014 after an earlier structure under the 1986 Act. It collects statutory royalties, broadcast fees, public-performance fees, mechanical royalties, from licensed music users, airlines, broadcasters, event organisers, retailers, and distributes the net proceeds to its members and, under reciprocal agreements with 43 foreign societies, to international rights holders whose works are used in Mauritius. None of that is in dispute in any source checked for this record.
What the July 2026 circular shows, in MASA’s own figures, is how thin the return on that collection can be by the time it reaches an individual songwriter or composer. The society collected 9,904,500.20 rupees that quarter from five categories: broadcasts on state broadcaster MBC’s television service across 2021, 2022 and 2024 (4,064,739.00 rupees); MBC radio across Mauritius and Rodrigues from 2021 to 2024 (2,775,281.20 rupees); occasional local and international events in 2025 (1,913,000.00 rupees); in-flight use by Air Mauritius in 2025 (1,131,300.00 rupees); and mechanical rights from September to December 2025 (20,180.00 rupees).
Against that gross figure, MASA deducted 2,966,627.87 rupees in administrative costs, just under 30 percent, and a further 516,020.93 rupees for its social and welfare fund. Combined, deductions ran to 35.2 percent of everything collected. What was left, 6,420,836.87 rupees, is the number that actually reached rights holders: 4,717,857.39 rupees to local members, 481,401.41 rupees passed to foreign societies for their members, and smaller sums to public-domain works, outside-society claims and a reserve. A further 1,037,891.55 rupees of the net amount, more than 16 percent of it, could not be paid out at all because the underlying works were mis-declared or not declared, money earned but unclaimable.
The payment-tier table attached to the circular is where the thinness becomes concrete. Of 2,160 local beneficiaries, 907 received between 0 and 100 rupees. Another 515 received between 100 and 500 rupees. Only 35 beneficiaries, across the entire quarter, received more than 25,000 rupees. A separate 4,375,562.59 rupees collected in the same period was not processed at all, deferred to the December 2026 round because MBC had not supplied complete viewing data for 2023 and a batch of small commercial users submitted their returns late.
The MUR 8.3 million that is, and is not, the same number#
A Mauritian press report in early August 2026 described MBC as having paid MASA 8.3 million rupees in copyright arrears, and quoted a working musician, Rico Clair, saying the amount he personally received was not enough. MASA’s own circular tells a narrower story about that specific figure: the two MBC categories it actually distributed that round, television and radio combined, total 6,840,020.20 rupees, not 8.3 million. Add back the 1,624,625.00 rupees of 2023 MBC television royalties that MASA held back for incomplete data, and the total climbs to roughly 8.46 million rupees, close enough to the reported figure to suggest the press number describes MBC’s full obligation for the period rather than money that had actually reached an artist’s bank account. No source checked states that reconciliation explicitly. It is this piece’s own reading of two numbers that do not, on their face, match.
The 95 million rupees nobody has explained#
The larger figure has a clearer paper trail, even without a clear resolution. Richard Hein took over as MASA’s part-time president in April 2025. By August of that year, MASA’s director, Gerard Louise, who had himself just returned to the role after a fourteen-year suspension tied to what Mauritian press called a “Sony Music affair” (a court later cleared him), confirmed on the record that “today, there are 95 million rupees in MASA’s account,” and said the society could not distribute it until it determined how much belonged to rights holders and how much counted as administrative cost.
On 3 November 2025, re-elected board member Jonathan Becherel held a press conference to say he alone had filed a complaint with Mauritius’s Financial Crimes Commission over the society’s financial management. He said Hein was the one who had found the 95 million rupees sitting undistributed, that two National Audit Office reports and one Office of Public Sector Governance report describing mismanagement had been kept confidential for three years, and that unnamed “invisible plotters” inside MASA were working against Hein for having exposed it. He asked the arts minister not to remove Hein.
The minister removed him anyway. A letter dated 3 November 2025, signed by the ministry’s permanent secretary, ended Hein’s presidency after roughly seven months, with no public reason given beyond what Becherel’s account supplies. Mauritius’s Union of Artists voted to freeze the 95 million rupees pending what it called an audit trail into where the money had come from. MASA’s board installed a new president, Joelle Coret, by the time of the next AGM.
Arts and Culture Minister Mahen Goondeea (rendered Gondeea in some reporting) spoke publicly about the sum for the first time in May 2026, after facing accusations that his ministry wanted to seize it. He said every rupee would be “distributed transparently” and that he had ordered an independent forensic audit to establish where the money had come from and who it belonged to. By September 2026, according to the most recent reporting checked for this record, the ministry had engaged the firm Moore Mauritius for a four-month mandate, with affected rights holders expected to be identified “in early 2027.” As of MASA’s AGM on 4 October 2026, no audit result had been published and no payment date had been set. A CISAC representative attending a ministry meeting four days before that AGM was reported as praising MASA’s reform progress and urging the government to keep supporting it, without addressing the 95 million rupees directly.
Whether that sum has any connection to the deductions, reserves or deferred categories visible in the July 2026 circular is not stated anywhere. It may be an entirely separate, older accumulation. It may not be. Nobody who has spoken on the record, not Louise, not Goondeea, not the firm now auditing it, has said.
What this means for artists#
If you are a Mauritian composer, author or publisher registered with MASA, the July 2026 numbers are a reasonable guide to what a routine quarterly payment might actually look like: a real check, deposited by bank transfer, that for most members will be smaller than a single hour’s minimum wage. That is not evidence of fraud. It is evidence of what a small market, a roughly 30 percent cost structure and thousands of beneficiaries sharing a few million rupees in broadcast and event royalties produces by arithmetic alone.
The 95 million rupees is a different kind of risk, and a different kind of patience is warranted around it. Nothing in the record checked here shows that sum is lost, stolen or unrecoverable; it also shows no one has yet said, on the record, exactly whose it is. An independent audit is in progress with a stated timeline. Until that audit reports, any claim about where that money will end up, including a claim that it is safe, is a forecast, not a fact.
If you license Mauritian repertoire from outside the country, MASA’s reciprocal structure with 43 foreign societies is real and operating, as the local-versus-foreign split in the July circular shows. But the same circular shows a collecting society still working through basic data problems, undeclared works, late submissions from its own licensees, that any foreign counterparty relying on its numbers should build into its own expectations.
Mauritius is not alone in this pattern among the continent’s smaller statutory collecting societies. A government-commissioned report in the Democratic Republic of Congo has left 25 million dollars meant for SOCODA’s artists unaccounted for despite four separate court rulings on who controls the society. The Gambia’s own tourism ministry contradicted its own copyright office over whether its collecting society was actually running. What distinguishes Mauritius’s case is the specificity of its own paperwork: a named circular, a named audit firm, a named timeline for early 2027, and a 95-million-rupee figure that four separate officials have now confirmed exists without any of them saying where it came from or where it is going.
