Fiji’s Rent Racket

Receipts Urged To Curb It

Prom Our Own Correspondent

Suva, Oct. 23

ALTHOUGH no publicity has yet been given to it locally, there are signs that the Government of Fiji may be asked for legislation to enforce the giving of receipts in all business transactions where receipts are normally required.

This demand has been brewing for years, but several factors are now working to bring matters to a head.

The first of these is Suva’s overcrowding problem in the slum and semi-slum areas.

With alternative accommodation Impos sible to find, masses of low-wage workers and their families are at the mercy of merciless Asiatic landlords, who use devious means of evading the fair-rent regulations and who step up rentals to the last penny that can be wrung from people who dare not complain lest they are thrown out of the only shelter available to them.

And because few, if any, Asiatic land lords can be induced to give their tenants receipts the tenants are open to another form of despicable exploitation—threats of legal action for the recovery of rent which has actually been paid.

From any point of view the slum situation at Suva is a national scandal, and in a centre where the cost of living continues to be pushed up by overseas conditions, and is made worse by the profiteering in local foodstuffs, tempers are short over the rent racket. Fijians, of course, are the main victims.

Europeans who would like to see some thing done for the exploited Fijian are looking to a possible Fijian claim against an Indian landlord to provide useful ammunition. This Indian, it is alleged, with the support of an Indian lawyer,

seized virtually the entire contents of the Fijian tenant’s home in the absence of the owner and his wife. The Fijian maintains that the Indian’s allegation of unpaid rent is untrue and is believed to be prepared to produce at least one witness of the actual payment. The tenant, of course, has no receipt.

It is known that in this case the Fijian made an appeal to a high Government authority and that prompt official action secured the return of the seized property.

In addition to the landlords, Indian tailors do not give receipts for payment.

IT is clear that the Government would find it hard to give any logical reason for not granting full legal authority to demands for receipts. Compulsory receipts would check the illegal excess rent racket—at least until ways of getting round the receipts were worked out—and receipts could help in recovering the sub stantial sums lost every year through Asiatic evasion of income tax. (Official dom openly admits and laments the loss but does not mention what would happen

to any European with a medium salary who attempted some of the activities which wealthy Asiatics engage in with impunity). Finally, compulsory receipts would assuredly provide increased stamp duty returns.