OH WHAT A FINE MESS WE ARE IN The Prime Minister appears to be in a muddle with the economy

 Sri Lanka’s Prime Minister serving his fourth term in office, claimed that he did not know why ‘we followed growth focused on large government infrastructure development projects”. An increasingly muddled Prime Minister then went on to say that the “Central Bank’s duty is to audit the central government debt. And the Auditor General’s duty is to audit the central government debt”. The Prime Minister was speaking at a memorial conference for the late Saman Kalegama the former Head of the Institute of Policy Studies.

The Prime Minister is full of contradictions for although he says the Rajapaksas had several options to follow but chose infrastructure development for growth, no sooner the Prime Minister was appointed within weeks his Minister of Highways was presenting a request for Rs 20 Billion to pay for highway projects. The Minister was Kabir Hashim who was the Secretary General of the UNP at the time. This matter was the starting point of the now infamous “Bondagate” scam.  The gains for a company whose owners and extended family are known to the Prime Minister amounted to over Rs 12 Billion already declared and at least a further Rs 5.5 billion yet to be declared.

That is not all that the Prime Minister did: although he can’t understand why previously the government hankered after development projects, it was the Prime Minister’s own Mr Lakshman Kiriella as the Minister then in charge of Highways who held meeting with contractors of the Central Expressway 3^rd Phase project, in a blatant disregard for process and procedure and procurement guidelines. That project was worth in the region of USD 1 Billion. The insurance premium alone was in excess of USD 100 Million.

Our contemporary history is littered with infrastructure projects that this same Prime Minister embarked on or continued with, in spite of his contrary statements.

The Auditor General’s department confirmed that they were the authority on auditing all government debt and stated that they were at a loss to understand how the Central Bank can audit themselves.