Your card declined at Adobe. At Airbnb. At an Apple gift card. Maybe at a newspaper subscription.
It isn’t a glitch and it isn’t unrelated to the resort story.
Card payments, imports and state debt all come out of the same pool of foreign currency, a pool that comes through tourism and most of which never reaches a Maldivian bank. Of last year’s US$5.6 billion in tourism receipts, the central bank says US$3.2 billion entered the domestic banking system. Of that, 21 per cent was exchanged to rufiyaa.
This week the government doubled the share resorts must convert, to 40 per cent, and made it an offence to advertise or promote a rate above MVR15.42. Resort workers are talking about striking. Police raided a company that operates a resort. Reserves keep falling.
We’ve laid out where things stand and how they got here: why the card limits exist, what MVR15.42 actually is, whether any of it has worked, and what the central bank says it wants instead. https://maldivesindependent.com/explainer/daily-budget-for-this-website-reached-nowhere-left-to-buy-a-dollar-f35d
