Vital question remains unanswered

Display of vehicles:

Newly appointed Director General of the President’s Media Division Dr. Najith Indika yesterday said that many of the vehicles belonging to the Presidential Secretariat had been returned by those who used them before the recently concluded presidential election.

Due to insufficient parking space at the Presidential Secretariat, those vehicles had been parked along the road near Galle Face Green, Dr. Indika said in response to our query why a large number of state vehicles had been parked near Galle Face and near Sri Lanka Foundation.

“We are currently examining the relevant details pertaining to those vehicles and will issue an official statement in a day or two. We are in the process of receiving more vehicles,” Dr. Indika said. However, he did not say whether all the vehicles being displayed to the public belonged to the Presidential Secretariat and had been misused under previous governments.

Some state officials, asked for comment on Dr. Indika’s claim, said many of those vehicles belonged to different ministries and other state outfits, and when those who had used them lawfully tried to return them to the institutions which they had worked for, after the government change, they had been asked to take the vehicles to the Presidential Secretariat, where they were instructed to park them either near Galle Face Green or Sri Lanka Foundation. All our efforts to ascertain the government’s response to the aforesaid claim were in vain as Dr. Indika did not answer his phone.

There were nearly 100 vehicles parked along the roads by their former users and several hundred such vehicles were yet to be returned, according to NPP Executive Committee member and former MP, Wasantha Samarasinghe. He told the media yesterday they had returned the vehicles following an order from President Anura Kumara Dissanayake that all those who had received vehicles from the Presidential Secretariat return them immediately. However, he, too, did not say specifically whether all those vehicles belonged to the Presidential Secretariat and had been misused.

After inspecting a large number of vehicles parked near Baladaksha Mawatha, opposite the Presidential Secretariat, former MP Samarasinghe said: “These vehicles have been parked by those who used them. We have records of 833 luxury vehicles belonging to the Presidential Secretariat that were assigned to various individuals. We have been able to trace only some of them. We are aware that at least 29 of them have been missing since 2022.

“When Anura Kumara Dissanayake took office, we found that 253 vehicles belonging to the Presidential Secretariat had gone missing. Some of those who used those vehicles have parked them here, while others are near Laksala and the Sri Lanka Foundation Institute.”

“These vehicles would still have been in use if Anura Kumara had not become the President,” Samarasinghe said.