News
Tamil parties sceptical of Ranil’s outreach
Effort lacks sincerity, only to show international community’, contend Tamil MPs
BY MEERA SRINIVASAN
Reaching out to Tamil parties in Parliament on Nov 10, President Ranil Wickremesinghe invited them for a discussion this week, and pledged to resolve their pending issues before the island nation’s 75 th Independence Day falling on February 4, 2023. However Tamil politicians, who are yet to receive a date for the said meeting, are highly sceptical.
Many Sri Lankan leaders have in the past promised, and invariably failed, to deliver a political solution to the island’s Tamil national question. Most recently, the Maithripala Sirisena-Wickremesinghe administration, in power between 2015 and 2019, attempted to draft a new constitution but did not complete the task, much to the disappointment of Tamils who backed their government. “Let us all get together and make it a point to solve this problem by our 75th anniversary of Independence. We don’t need others to intervene in our country’s matters. We can solve our issues,” Wickremesinghe told Parliament last week.
The Tamil National Alliance (TNA), the largest grouping of legislators from the north and east, welcomed his call and expressed readiness to “fully cooperate”. TNA Leader and 89-year-old parliamentarian R. Sampanthan, who has been trying to negotiate a constitutional settlement with various Sinhalese leaders for decades, has said that he hopes the President’s pledge is genuine this time. The southern leadership must be prepared to do away with the unitary constitution, former Chief Minister of the Northern Province C.V. Wigneswaran has said, ahead of the possible meeting with the President.
TNA spokesman M.A. Sumanthiran said despite known differences among Tamil parties, the TNA invited them for a discussion this week, “as we all share the objective of achieving meaningful power devolution under a federal set up”. The meeting of Tamil parties did not materialise as planned. “We are hopeful of holding it,” he said, while raising doubts about President Wickremesinghe’s “seriousness”. Sumanthiran said he asked President Wickremesinghe, at the tea party following the Budget on Nov 14, about the said meeting. “The President told me that he was coming to Jaffna in January. When I asked him about this week’s meeting that he had announced, he said that if we wanted, we could meet this week. It [his responses] showed there is no seriousness to do anything in earnest,” the Jaffna MP said.
The need for greater power devolution and a political solution have also been central to Indian engagement in Sri Lanka. In the September session of the UN Human Rights Council, the Indian delegation noted “with concern the lack of measurable progress” by Sri Lanka on their commitments of a political solution to the ethnic issue. India has consistently urged Sri Lanka to “fully implement” the 13th Amendment in the Sri Lankan constitution, even though Tamil parties in Sri Lanka frequently point to its inadequacies.
While sharply critical of the TNA’s positions, Jaffna legislator Gajendrakumar Ponnambalam, who leads the Tamil National People’s Front (TNPF), said the TNA’s recent invitation to other Tamil parties for a discussion was welcome, for it put federalism “back on the agenda”. In his view, even if President Wickremesinghe were to convene the meeting, “there is no point in engaging” unless he openly commits to basing the discussion on a federal constitution.
Recalling a conversation with the President in parliament, Ponnambalam said the President “just rejected federalism”. “So, what are we going to discuss with him? He simply wants to show the world that his government is legitimate, stable, and that he is talking to all actors. He just needs us to be at the negotiating table,” Ponnambalam told The Hindu.
“If he [President] is sincere in his pledge to resolve the Tamil question, federalism should be a pre-condition for these talks. He should be open about it, and not lie to the Sinhalese people.”
Although Ponnambalam did not sound upbeat about the President’s invitation to Tamil parties, he is optimistic that the economic and political crisis this year has presented “a real opportunity for Sri Lanka to soul-search” and decisively address the long-pending concerns of Tamils. “People of the south feel let down. They see that their leaders fought a war in their name, pursued racist policies in their name…and for the first time since 1948 [year of Sri Lankan Independence] they are calling into question all that they have been told by [Sinhalese] leaders. If we can get our act together now as a country, we can certainly set things right,” he said. (The Hindu)
[Prime Minister’s Media Division]
[Prime Minister’s Media Division]
… warn of dire consequences
A group of trade unions and civil society groups has requested President Anura Kumara Dissanayake to abandon his government’s controversial plan for the proposed tripartite management of the EPF.
The group has told the President: “We strongly object to the government’s plan to transfer the EPF to a tripartite board—jointly promoted by the Employers’ Federation of Ceylon (EFC), International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the International Labour Organisation (ILO)—and to increase the investments of those funds within private equity and debt markets.
“While the EFC and the government jointly project this plan as a ‘modern governance framework’, it poses a serious threat to the EPF’s financial stability, fiduciary conduct, and returns to workers’ life savings, with severe consequences for broader macroeconomic stability. Rather than replacing the corruption existing in the public sector, this tripartite framework paves the way for a corporate takeover of the EPF. Through this, the fund is exposed to unlawful business practices such as insider trading using internal information of EPF investments, conflicts of interest and corporate bailouts of unstable private companies.
“Sri Lanka’s corporate sector has a tremendously negative track record, which you alluded to during your victorious election campaign in 2024. This was recently unravelled by the multi-billion-dollar illicit capital flight through trade misinvoicing, which your administration is now actively working to curb in the imports sector.
“The recent banking sector fraud exceeds Rs. 13 billion; widespread corporate tax evasion destabilised the fiscal position (Sri Lanka Auditor General’s Department Annual Reports) and consequently inflated the tax burden on the general public. The EFC has found it convenient to remain silent about these crimes, possibly assuming that their silence would preserve their social standing. Considering this inherent corruption within Sri Lanka’s corporate sector and its disregard to the living standards of the general public, there is no realistic basis to integrate corporate interests to actively manage the EPF. The corporate sector of Sri Lanka has not developed sufficiently on technical and ethical grounds to safely entrust the largest retirement savings pool in the country. The EPF is a captive fund that has no mechanism for the owners to divest if the management is corrupt. This further increases the possibility of corporate fraud when the management of the fund is jointly held with the corporate sector.
“Furthermore, during the recent public discussion with trade unions, Deputy Minister of Finance Dr. Anila Jayantha pointed out that the domestic debt restructuring (DDR) would inflict a loss of Rs. 600 billion to the EPF. Our independent calculations—formally submitted as an affidavit to the Supreme Court approved by the Federation of University Teachers’ Associations in 2024—reveal that nominal loss alone is Rs. 634.4 billion. When factoring in foreclosed reinvestment returns, the true loss skyrockets to Rs. 1,711 billion, wiping out 48% of the fund’s projected gross income for the 2023 – 2028 period. Under the pretext of safeguarding the banking system, this colossal robbery preserved high yields on government bonds held by commercial banks and high-net-worth individuals, subsequently reaping them astronomical profits. Now, the exact same plunder is rearing its head again disguised as a tripartite committee.”
“The main arguments supporting our resistance and viable alternatives for optimising EPF management directly under the Central Bank of Sri Lanka (CBSL), are outlined below.
“Objections to the government’s tripartite proposal:
1. The “International best practice and conflict of interest fallacies”
The government holds that tripartite management of pension funds is the “international best practice” and that there is a “conflict of interest” in CBSL managing the EPF. They are key pillars justifying government’s tripartite proposal.
These two positions are shockingly misleading given that four of the five largest pension funds in the world, in Norway, Japan, the U.S., and Singapore, are managed directly by state bodies or central banks. Therefore, ‘international best practice’ in pension fund management is the exact opposite of what the government and the IMF are proposing. We hence reject these baseless positions.
2. Corporate captivity and bailouts
It is clear that the EFC is desperately pushing for this proposal at a time of global uncertainty, to cushion the effects of the crisis and maximise gains. Under corporate influence within the proposed tripartite board, the private conglomerates can use the multi-trillion-rupee EPF to continue their unstable commercial operations without having to risk their own capital or savings to do so. This will severely erode the financial stability of the EPF and its returns.
3. Risk of front running
“Because the EPF is a colossal fund, its investment decisions can alter asset prices. This creates immense monetary value for the information generated by its investment decisions. Corporate representatives on the proposed tripartite board will be perfectly positioned to use this information to trade ahead of the EPF (front-running), buying assets cheaply and dumping them onto the EPF at inflated prices for guaranteed corporate gain, resulting in a reduction of returns to the EPF.
4. Unavoidable loopholes
“Presence of a separate group of investment analysts, trade union representatives and government officials within the proposed tripartite structure cannot prevent pre-market corporate access to EPF’s investment decisions. Investment proposals made by the analysts has to be first approved by the proposed tripartite committee, making it impossible to prevent corporate access to insider information on EPF investments.”
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