The Committee stage of Budget 2025 began in the House on Thursday with cartloads of mud – if mud it really was – thrown at past leaders of this country by the present incumbents. It can be credibly argued that what was on display was not plain mud slinging but an expose of the scandalous profligacy of past presidents of this country, chief among them President Mahinda (born Percy Mahendra) Rajapaksa, and Ranil Wickremesinghe upon whom the presidency of this country was fortuitously bestowed months after he himself had been defeated in his Colombo bastion and had led the UNP to an ignominious zero elected seat defeat at the 2020 parliamentary election. After much foot dragging, Wickremesinghe took the UNP’s single National List slot and ended up as President of the Republic! “Fortuitous circumstances,” as one time Prime Minister W. Dahanayake called his own ascendancy to the prime ministry.

All that, of course, is water under the bridges. An outspoken former prime minister of yesteryear, Sir. John Kotelawela, is remembered, among other things, for his homespun Sinhala remark, “henda athey thiyanakam bedagnilla (as long as the spoon is in your hand, serve yourselves); and serve themselves they did – and how! The public was not unaware of how their elected leaders, pledged to serve the voter, have lavished tax rupees on themselves. But they were not privy to exactly how much – and the amounts are stupendous – the national exchequer had to bear in rupees and cents terms. The new regime had the opportunity to get the show on the road when the president’s votes came up for discussion at the committee stage of the budget and it seized it with both hands.

Travel on the official account has long been a favorite pastime of Lankan from presidents and prime ministers downwards, and also the private sector, attributable partly to the foreign exchange restrictions enforced for long years. A policeman of a bygone era said of his boss, a famed investigator of yesteryear, that if any foreign travel was involved in any matter investigated, the file stopped at his desk. Foreign suppliers of equipment have long been aware that one of the best ways of winning contracts is tossing a couple of freebies in the direction of prospective decision takers..

How many engineers in the employment of the state have gone abroad on equipment factory visits and for test runs on the supplier’s account? Who can forget the greed for places on the board of board of directors of first Air Ceylon, then Air Lanka and finally SriLankan Airlines. Why? The free travel perk not only for the directors themselves but also for members of their families.

Thursdays revelatory numbers were eloquent. President Mahinda Rajapaksa, who served two terms and unsuccessfully sought a third after amending the constitution for the purpose, had spent over Rs. 3.57 billion on travel in four years (2010 to 2014) of his second term. What this was in his first term has not been stated by the incumbents who had obviously got a lot of midnight oil burnt to dig out the figures brandished on Thursday by Prime Minister Harini Amarasuriya.

The voters (and the party that elected him as president locum tenens) did not give Wickremesinghe, despite his success in restoring a semblance of normalcy after the aragalaya, any more than the balance of Gotabaya Rajapaksa’s term when GR fled the country. In the limited two years he had from 2023 to 2024, his foreign travel bill was Rs. 531 million. He attended Queen Elizabeth’s and the Japanese Emperor’s funerals and King Charles’ coronation apart from other overseas visits.

Maithripala Sirisena and Gotabaya Rajapaksa have not done badly either. The former spent Rs. 384 million between 2015 and 2019 while Gotabaya cost the taxpayer Rs. 128 million from 2020 to 2022. We do not know whether the cost of operating an SLN ship to ferry him and his wife from Colombo to Trincomalee and an SLAF aircraft to fly them to the Maldives from where GR went to Singapore and resigned have been included in the figures given to parliament.

But we are sure that the cost incurred by SriLankan Airlines to divert a flight to Zurich to pick up a puppy dog for his wife was not included in the figures on offer. All this number crunching led up to the flag waving climax of the story: President Aura Kumara Dissanayake’s trips for the months from September 2024 to February 2025, including two state visits to India and China and a Governance Summit in Dubai had cost Rs. 1.8 million. Whether the hosts bore the air fares was not stated. Perhaps the question may be raised as the debate proceeds.

Let us also not forget that apart from his official travel, MR wanted paid passengers bounced off a SriLankan flight to accommodate his entourage. That sorry story ended Emirates’ partnership with SriLankan being terminated after the national carrier had been turned round to profit by its managing partner. The billions SriLankan lost subsequently was money down the drain; the now abandoned attempt to privatize the airline attracted no takers.

Justice Minister Harshana Nanayakkara said RW had 39 presidential advisers with his adviser on parliamentary affairs in school when RW entered parliament! He asked whether the former president knew anything at all if he needed so many advisors. While these patronage appointees had lavish pay and perks, the president has three advisors all working for free!

The ongoing debate promises to be a “full serial” as offered to film-goers once upon a time. Whether an emasculated opposition can give as much as it gets remains to be seen as the new messiahs give themselves a sheen.

Saturday 1st March, 2025

The government is trying to gain political mileage and retain popular support not by carrying out its election pledges and granting relief to the public but by continuing to attack its political rivals. Hardly a day passes without the ruling NPP coalition releasing a list of wrongdoings or misdeeds of the previous dispensations.

In the late 1980s, the JVP used to control many parts of the country with ‘chits’ (which conveyed its diktats, threats and warnings), and today the JVP-led NPP is apparently trying to consolidate its power with the help of ‘lists’. It seems to think it can distract the public from the burning issues affecting them, and counter the Opposition’s hostile propaganda by releasing ‘lists’ one after the other.

The government has released a list of individuals who received huge amounts of state funds as compensation for their properties damaged or destroyed during Aragalaya (2022) in various parts of the country. Chief Government Whip Dr. Nalinda Jayatissa told Parliament on Thursday that among the recipients of compensation was Gnanakka of Anuradhapura, a self-proclaimed seeress.

A former hospital orderly, she has among her clients powerful politicians, high-ranking military officers and business leaders. Dr. Jayatissa’s latest list may have gone down well with the irate public, but the question is whether it will help make them forget the soaring prices of essentials and the government’s unfulfilled pledges, which are legion.

A protest by refilling station owners disrupted the fuel supply countrywide last night, causing long lines of vehicles to form. The government was all at sea.

On Thursday, another ‘list’ was released in Parliament. Participating in the committee-stage budget debate, Prime Minister Dr. Harini Amarasuriya conveyed to the House that President Anura Kumara Dissanayake’s three foreign trips had cost only Rs. 1.8 mn. She revealed the staggering amounts spent on the foreign trips undertaken by previous Presidents—Mahinda Rajapaksa, Maithripala Sirisena, Gotabaya Rajapaksa and Ranil Wickremesinghe. The NPP and its leaders were careful with state funds and not given to leading the high life at the expense of the public, she declared.

The SLPP has sought to justify the whopping amounts of state funds spent on President Mahinda Rajapaksa’s foreign trips. It has claimed that the benefits that accrued to the country from his overseas travel should be factored in. However, the fact remains that he should have curtailed his foreign travel expenses drastically.

He took planeloads of hangers-on whenever he went abroad. It was jokingly said in those days that only cats and dogs were left at Medamulana when the Rajapaksas went on foreign junkets!

Many politicians are known to undertake foreign travel on astrological advice as well; they leave the country on some pretext or another in the belief that they can avoid malefic influence of certain planetary combinations. So, the blame for some previous leaders’ expensive foreign travel should be apportioned to the likes of Gnanakka of Anuradhapura.

PM Amarasuriya’s claim about the costs of President Dissanayake’s three foreign trips sounded too good to be true. The Opposition promptly demanded to know how the President, accompanied by eleven others, had travelled to India, China and Dubai on a shoestring budget of Rs. 1.8 million. MP Chamara Sampath Dassanayake asked whether President Dissanayake had received half price air tickets. He said he would like to know the airline the President had used so that he and other Opposition MPs also could fly cheaply.

Minister Jayatissa sought to defend PM Amarasuriya yesterday by claiming that President Dissanayake had received free air tickets for visiting China and Dubai. One is intrigued. Has the PM Amarasuriya left out the expenses incurred by the state on behalf of the politicians, officials, security officers, and others who accompanied President Dissanayake when he went overseas? How much did their travel and accommodation cost the state coffers? Did she combine the expenses of the previous Presidents and their entourages when calculating the costs of their foreign travel? She should provide breakdowns of these costs if she is not to be accused of stretching the truth.

Friday 28th February, 2025

A surge in underworld activities has left the NPP government red-faced, but it has eclipsed all other issues that remain unsolved. Nobody is talking about the high prices of coconuts, rice and other essentials, and the unfulfilled campaign promises of the ruling coalition. Underworld killings have also distracted the public, the Opposition and the media from Budget 2025, its shortcomings, and the government’s failure to bring the perpetrators of unsolved emblematic crimes to justice. Television channels are devoting prime time to vivid narratives about the slain underworld figure, Ganemulle Sanjeewa, tracing his life from the zygote stage to the zipping bullet that felled him in the dock of a court recently. A statement made by Cabinet Spokesman and Minister Dr. Nalinda Jayatissa about a high-profile financial crime has not received much attention.

Answering a question from a journalist at Tuesday’s post-Cabinet media briefing, Minister Jayatissa said the government was trying to have former Central Bank Governor Arjuna Mahendran extradited to stand trial here over the 2015 Treasury bond scams. The case would go on with or without Mahendran being present in court, Dr. Jayatissa said, taking a swipe at former President Ranil Wickremesinghe, who, he said, was duty-bound to help bring Mahendran back. He recalled that Wickremesinghe and Mahendran were friends, and Wickremesinghe had told Parliament as the Prime Minister in the Yahapalana government that Mahendran had left the country to attend a wedding.

We can’t think of anything stupider than to expect Wickremesinghe to help bring Mahendran back and commit political hara-kiri in the process. The JVP/NPP has alleged Wickremesinghe’s complicity in what Mahendran did. The incumbent administration came to power, promising to conduct probes into numerous financial crimes that had gone uninvestigated and bring their perpetrators to justice. But one should not be so naïve as to expect the NPP government to go the whole hog to ensure that all those responsible for the Treasury bond scams are punished, for those rackets took place during a JVP-UNP honeymoon.

One may recall that during a heated argument between NPP leader Anura Kumara Dissanayake and Wickremesinghe, who had just been appointed Prime Minister, in the SLPP government, the latter happened to say that if he divulged certain things, Dissanayake would face serious problems in the JVP. Wickremesinghe’s hard uppercut had the same effect as a stun grenade. The NPP parliamentary group chose to remain silent without calling Wickremesinghe’s bluff. Does Wickremesinghe have aces up his sleeve?

Interestingly, the JVP was part of the Executive Council of the UNP-led Yahapalana government when the first Treasury bond scam was carried out in Feb., 2015, and it had no qualms about continuing to back the UNP to the hilt subsequently. When President Maithripala Sirisena and Mahinda Rajapaksa joined forces to topple the Yahapalana government, the JVP helped Wickremesinghe abort that move, giving that dysfunctional regime a new lease of life to blunder alone, neglect national security and create a situation where the National Thowheed Jamath terrorists could carry out the Easter Sunday attacks with ease. Above all, during the Yahapalana government, the COPE (Committee on Public Enterprises), which probed the Treasury bond scams, under JVP stalwart Sunil Handunetti’s chairmanship, carefully avoided mentioning Wickremesinghe as a suspect, in its final report.

The SJB consists of former UNPers, who unashamedly safeguarded Mahendran’s interests in and outside Parliament during the Yahapalana government and even sought to dilute the COPE report on the Treasury bond scams by having a slew of footnotes incorporated into it. It therefore does not want to open a can of worms by calling for Mahendran’s extradition. The SLPP did not even make a serious effort to have Mahendran brought back while it was in power from 2019 to 2024. Some of its key members stand accused of having benefited from the Treasury bond racketeers’ largesse. So, Mahendran can rest assured that neither the incumbent government nor the Opposition will push for his extradition.