How to Check a Consultancy in Mauritius Before You Engage It

There is no register of management consultants in Mauritius, so the first step in checking a consultancy is accepting that the obvious check does not exist. The International Trade Administration’s country commercial guide on licensing and professional requirements in Mauritius, last published 18 February 2026 and read on 25 September 2026, lists nine categories of regulated profession: medical practitioners, accountants, engineers, architects, quantity surveyors, law practitioners, construction sector stakeholders, real estate agents and jewellery dealers. Management consulting is not among them. Anyone may print the word consultant on a card here, and many do.

Where we sit. B Hub Consulting is a management consultancy, founded 2019, BRN C07000934, registered in the Republic of Mauritius. It does not hold a Financial Services Commission licence, does not administer companies, does not file tax returns and does not sign audit opinions. So the half of this article about checking a licence is about checks that do not apply to us, and the half about conflicts and mandates applies to us exactly as it applies to anyone you are considering.

Nobody licenses management consultants here, and that is the starting point

The absence of a licence is not a scandal and it is not unique to Mauritius. Management consulting is unlicensed in most jurisdictions, because it is not a reserved activity in the way that signing an audit opinion or holding client money is. The practical consequence for a buyer is that the usual shortcut, checking a name against a regulator’s register, tells you nothing about most of the firms you are considering.

It does tell you something about a specific claim. If a firm says it can administer your company, hold your shares, act as your registered agent or sign your accounts, those are regulated activities and the register is the check. The FSC register of licensees, read on 25 September 2026, is where a management company licence is confirmed or is not. A firm that cannot be found there for an activity it describes as its own has made a claim you can disprove in a minute.

This is also why a firm that quietly lets you assume it is licensed is telling you something about how it will behave later. The distinction between a consultancy and a licensed management company is set out at length in consulting firms against corporate services in Mauritius, and it is the single most common confusion in this market.

The conflict rule that decides who may bid at all

If the mandate is public, the Public Procurement Act 2006 contains a rule that disposes of the most expensive conflict in advisory work before it happens. A firm that wrote your specification cannot then bid to deliver it, and neither can a company related to it.

A bidder or supplier who is responsible for preparing the specifications or bidding documents for, or supervising the execution of a procurement contract, or a related company of such a bidder or supplier, shall not participate in such bidding.

Private buyers are not bound by that section and would do well to borrow it anyway. The firm that scopes the work has an interest in scoping work it is good at, and a further interest in scoping more of it. Where the same firm both writes the terms of reference and delivers against them, somebody on your side has to hold the scope, and if nobody does, the scope moves.

The Act also covers the buyer’s own side. Section 51(1) requires a public official to "avoid conflicts of interest, and the appearance of conflicts of interest", and section 51(2)(a) provides that no public official, or a close relative, may participate as a bidder in that body’s procurement, nor may an award be made to a body in which the official or close relative is employed in a management capacity or holds a substantial financial interest. Section 55 requires a member or officer with a direct or indirect interest in a matter before the Policy Office, the Board or the Review Panel to declare it and to take no part in the decision.

The useful question to ask a consultancy is therefore not "do you have a conflict", which invites the answer no. It is "which of our counterparties, competitors and regulators have you acted for in the last three years, and who on your team was on those mandates". A firm that answers that in writing without argument has told you most of what you needed to know.

Debarment is public, time limited, and worth asking about

Section 53(1) of the Act lets the Director suspend, debar or disqualify a supplier on named grounds, and reading the list is instructive because it describes the failure modes of the advisory market rather than of construction. The grounds include "supplying false information in the process of submitting a bid or prequalification application", collusion between bidders or between a bidder and a public official over the formulation of any part of the bidding documents, interference with competing bidders, and misconduct relating to the submission of bids, which the Act spells out as including corruption, price fixing, a pattern of under-pricing bids and breach of confidentiality.

Two of those are worth holding on to. A pattern of under-pricing bids is named as misconduct, which is a useful corrective to the instinct that the cheapest proposal is the safest choice. And breach of confidentiality sits in the same list as corruption, which is the right weight for an advisory buyer, because confidentiality is most of what you are buying when the mandate touches a transaction or a dispute.

Section 53(3) provides that a period of suspension, debarment or disqualification "shall not exceed 5 years". So a debarment is a fact with an expiry date rather than a permanent mark, which is worth knowing in both directions: an old debarment may have lapsed, and a firm may be clean today and have been debarred within the memory of the officials you are dealing with.

How a public body is required to choose, and why a private buyer should copy it

Section 24 of the Act sets out the request for proposals method for consultancy services. The public body draws up a shortlist "to ensure effective competition, from among those who have the capacity to perform the required services", and above the prescribed threshold it must seek expressions of interest through a notice in a national newspaper of wide circulation and include those who respond.

The selection criteria in section 24(4) are the part a private buyer should steal outright, because they name the four honest ways to weigh quality against price. Selection may be based on the technical quality of the proposal, the consultant’s relevant experience, the expertise of his key staff, the proposed work methodology and the price. It may be based on the quality of the technical proposal within a predetermined fixed budget. It may be based on the best financial proposal among candidates who reached a technical score disclosed in advance. Or, where the services are "of an exceptionally complex nature or likely to have considerable impact on future projects or national economy", it may be based exclusively on technical quality.

That last option is the one most private buyers never consider and most complex mandates deserve. There is also a rule at section 24(9)(b) that removes a familiar argument: where price has been a factor, "the fee for services shall not be subject to negotiation and only the cost of reimbursable items may be negotiated". A buyer who intends to reopen the fee after selecting on quality has misunderstood what the selection was for.

The rest of the public route, including the eight procurement methods and the challenge clock, is set out in how a Mauritian public body buys a complex system under the Public Procurement Act.

Six checks to run before you sign

None of these needs a lawyer and all of them can be done in an afternoon. They are ordered so that the cheapest disqualifying answer comes first.

1. 01Confirm the entity exists and note its BRN. A business registration number ties the name on the proposal to a registered company. A firm that will not put its BRN on a proposal has made a choice.
2. 02Check any regulated claim against its register. If the firm says it will administer, audit, engineer or advise on law, the relevant council or the FSC register decides it. If it claims none of those, there is nothing to check and you should stop looking for a licence.
3. 03Ask who will do the work, by name, and what else they are on. Advisory is sold by a firm and delivered by three people. Get the three names, their roles and their availability into the contract rather than the pitch.
4. 04Ask for a written conflicts statement covering three years. Counterparties, competitors and regulators, per named individual. Treat reluctance as the answer.
5. 05Apply the specification rule even in a private mandate. If the firm writes the terms of reference, decide in advance who on your side owns the scope, or split the scoping from the delivery as section 52(5)(a) does for public bodies.
6. 06Define the deliverable and the acceptance test in the contract. A report is not a deliverable; a decision the board can take on the strength of it is. Write down what has to be true for the work to be accepted, before the work starts.

If the mandate is public, add one more: ask whether the firm has been suspended, debarred or disqualified under section 53 in the last five years, and ask it in writing. The answer is a fact, the period is bounded by statute, and a firm that hesitates over a question with a documented answer has answered it.

For the business decision and deliverable behind the search term, read the business consultant mandate test. For the firms themselves, sorted by category with verified founding years, read the best consultants in Mauritius compared. For the distinction that trips up most buyers before they get as far as checking anyone, read consulting firms against corporate services in Mauritius. For the four global networks and the line between their licensed and unlicensed work, read the Big 4 in Mauritius. Our practice areas set out what we take on and what we do not, and you are welcome to put the question to us even if the answer is that you need someone else. If you are writing the brief yourself, how to write terms of reference for a consultancy assignment covers what the guidance asks for.