Lucky masterminds

Tuesday 28th September, 2021

Several persons including a trader have been arrested and remanded over the Sathosa garlic racket. Media pressure seems to have jolted the police into action at long last. Since a judicial inquiry is now underway into the allegations against the suspects, the matter is best left to the learned judges concerned.

One, however, cannot help wondering why no action has been taken against all high-ranking officials of Sathosa responsible for the questionable garlic deal. The internal memos on the purchase of the stock of garlic weighing 56,000 kilos from the Ports Authority and selling it to a private trader will help trace them. Those who signed the memos at issue could be asked on whose orders they sold the entire stock to a third party at Rs. 135 a kilo instead of making garlic available to the pandemic-hit people at the same price. But for the Consumer Affairs Authority (CAA) intervention, Sathosa would have repurchased the same stock of garlic at Rs. 445 a kilo and sold it to the public above Rs. 500 a kilo, as media reports indicate.

CAA Executive Director Thushan Gunawardena, whose intervention put paid to the efforts of the Sathosa officials to repurchase the garlic stock fraudulently, is now facing a witch-hunt for having blown the whistle. Investigators are barking up the wrong tree. Trade Minister Bandula Gunawardena, under whose purview Sathosa comes, has seen red. Why he is so agitated defies comprehension; he ought to go all out to have the garlic racket probed thoroughly and the culprits arrested and prosecuted, instead of finding fault with the media if his hands are clean.

Masterminds behind criminal operations have all the luck in this country. They never pay for their crimes, and their minions become scapegoats.

Archbishop of Colombo Malcolm Cardinal Ranjith and other Catholic prelates have been fighting quite a battle for more than two years to have the mastermind behind the Easter Sunday attacks traced, but to no avail. The people who defeated the yahapalana government, expecting the new dispensation to bring the real culprits to justice, are really disappointed. Not even the Presidential Commission of Inquiry that probed the bombing could identify the terror mastermind. It dealt with the issue perfunctorily.

Everybody knows that the mastermind behind the Treasury bond scams has gone scot free. The then Central Bank Governor Arjuna Mahendran obviously carried out the illegal operation by abusing his position, but the person who ordered him to do so has not been found out yet. If Mahendran is brought back to stand trial, he will squeal on others. The present government has chosen not to go the whole hog to have him extradited, and the manner in which it is handling the matter smacks of a quid pro quo. While the SLPP grandees were calling for stern action against the Treasury bond racketeers, during their Opposition days, we argued in this space that Mahendran would be safe under an SLPP government because the scammers had links with all major political parties.

The state coffers suffered staggering losses amounting to billions of rupees owing to the sugar tax racket under the present government, which slashed the import duty on sugar so that one of its cronies would stand to gain. After being exposed, it claimed it had done so to bring the sugar prices down. But sugar remains expensive and the SLPP financier is grinning from ear to ear. The mastermind behind the racket has not been identified.

So, the person who masterminded the Sathosa garlic racket, too, will go unnamed, uninvestigated and unpunished, and the intrepid whistleblower will be made to regret having exposed the scam if ministerial barks and police action are anything to go by. How can anyone say this land does not belong to the corrupt?