Mauritius investigators accelerate the money trail probe linking Malagasy tycoon Mamy Ravatomanga to the HITA oil refinery scandal

The Financial Crimes Commission in Mauritius is widening its investigation into jailed Malagasy tycoon Mamy Ravatomanga, with investigators now tracing fresh money trails connecting him to the Huilerie Industrielle de Tamatave, the industrial oil refinery at the center of one of Madagascar's most politically explosive corruption cases.

L'Express Mauritius reported this week that the FCC is accelerating its forensic audit of cross-border financial flows linked to Ravatomanga's business empire, with particular attention being paid to a network of Mauritius-registered offshore companies suspected of serving as conduits between HITA and accounts controlled by his SODIAT Group. The investigation is being conducted in coordination with Madagascar's anti-corruption court, the Pole Anti-Corruption, and has entered a new phase following the creation of a Joint Investigation Team between the FCC and French prosecutors, formalized at Eurojust headquarters in The Hague on April 14.

HITA is Madagascar's only industrial edible oil refinery and one of the country's most strategically sensitive commercial assets. Investigators allege that Ravatomanga was a silent beneficial owner of a significant stake in the operation, acquiring shares from a departing partner for approximately $30 million in 2024 without appearing in the company's official ownership structure. A Mauritius company called Higglo International Trading Ltd is identified by investigators as a central vehicle in the scheme, allegedly serving as an intermediary through which raw materials were purchased and resold to HITA at inflated margins, generating profits that were then routed offshore.

The broader HITA scandal involves allegations that the refinery was used to engineer artificial shortages of cooking oil and other basic food products in Madagascar, allowing connected parties to extract rents from a captive consumer market while the state, which held an indirect interest in the company through what investigators describe as a shadow partnership with Ravatomanga, was effectively blocked from exercising independent oversight.

Several SODIAT executives were detained in Madagascar in connection with the lychee export element of the same investigation in February 2026. That case, which resulted in Ravatomanga being named in his first international arrest warrant issued by the PAC around February 21, concerned allegations that SODIAT companies had exported lychee cargo to Mauritius through structures that artificially inflated margins, with funds then routed to European markets through a Mauritius intermediary. A second warrant followed on March 5 over alleged corruption in Madagascar's mining sector.

Ravatomanga was arrested in Mauritius on October 24, 2025, at a private clinic where he had been receiving treatment after arriving by private jet from Madagascar in mid-October as the political situation in the country deteriorated. The FCC charged him with laundering approximately 7.3 billion Mauritian rupees, roughly $163 million, through a network of offshore companies registered in Mauritius, Seychelles and elsewhere. The Commission obtained Criminal Attachment Orders from the Mauritius Supreme Court, freezing accounts held by Ravatomanga, members of his entourage and more than 40 affiliated companies. A former FCC commissioner was separately charged after investigators discovered, through intercepted communications, that he had secretly met with Ravatomanga in what authorities described as an attempt to obstruct the inquiry.

The case has moved far beyond the initial money laundering charges. The FCC's forensic teams are now conducting a full timeline reconstruction of Ravatomanga's cross-border deals spanning his entire period of political proximity to former President Andry Rajoelina, whose own movements since the October 2025 political transition have taken him between France and Dubai. The HITA angle is the newest and most commercially significant thread, because it connects the money laundering allegations to a specific and documentable set of transactions involving a real business with known revenues.

Madagascar's PAC has now issued three separate international arrest warrants against Ravatomanga. He remains in Mauritius, where proceedings have moved slowly in part because of his medical condition, which has been managed through extended hospitalisation in private clinics that his legal team has used to set the pace of FCC questioning sessions.