I've been meaning to blog this story for a few weeks, but kept being distracted. And I wanted a nice picture too, especially for my overseas visitors. Here is the infamous new building near Muscat International Airport, built by sacked Minister of Manpower Juma Al Juma.
As you can see, it is now being summarily torn down, in a highly public display of what happens when you take things too far, Minister or not.
The story that finally emerged is that the building was both too high for the international rules for the glide path of an international airport, and was being partially built on some other Minister's land, and it had been built under an illegitimate building permit issued by ex-head of the Muscat Municipality, who allegedly over-ruled his engineer.
They got caught, and His Majesty was not impressed. Hence the dismissals, and now the building is being torn down too. Apparently the place got ransacked of its fixures before the demolition crew moved in, after word got out of the order to tear it down. Everybody knows the story, and people actually visit the site (next to the Shell Petrol Station as you approach the airport from Muscat) to see it. But of course not a whisper of it in the press!!
A similar deconstruction occured a few years ago in Qurm, where the unfinished palace of another disgraced Minister (on the site next door to the Khimji's big place) was torn down and the land apparently confiscated.
Such is the fate of those who fly too close to the sun. His Majesty knows full well of the corruption that surrounds him, but he has apparently said, when asked why he didn't replace those Ministers and officials he knew to be enriching themselves from the public purse, "Better a full rat than a hungry rat".
A wise man indeed.
But in this case they went too far, both endangering the airport and letting a spat about the ownership of land become public. Hence the very public nature of the dismissals.
