News

The Kurunegala Magistrate’s Court this evening (25) granted bail to Dr. Mohomad Shafi Sihabdeen, who served at the Kurunegala Teaching Hospital, when the controversial case was taken up for hearing today.

Dr. Shafi was arrested by the Kurunegala Police in May this year for allegedly accumulating wealth in a questionable manner. However, the doctor was later accused of maintaining links with terrorist groups and conducting illegal sterilization of women during childbirth.

The Criminal Investigations Department (CID) took over the investigation on Dr. Shafi from the Kurunegala Police and conducted an extensive probe into the allegations. When the case was taken up previously on July 11th, the Kurunegala Magistrate ordered to further remand Dr. Shafi to date despite claims there was no evidence to support allegations against Dr. Shafi.

Appearing on behalf of the Attorney General, Deputy Solicitor General Thusith Mudalige had said on July 11th that the three-month detention order against Dr. Shafi was withdrawn on July 10th after the Ministry of Defence was informed that the evidence against Dr. Shafi was inadequate to prove that he had received funds from a terrorist organization to promote their activities.

The CID that conducted the investigation has informed court that there was no evidence to support any of the allegations leveled against Dr. Shafi.

The CID also informed the Parliamentary Select Committee (PSC) probing the Easter Sunday attacks that there was no evidence against the accusations faced by Dr. Shafi despite claims by some media institutions, lawyers, politicians and Buddhist monks.

In a latest development, the British government has launched an investigation after Sri Lankan authorities said they would send back more than hundred shipping containers because they appeared to contain human remains disguised as recyclable metals, The Telegraph reported.

Officials at the port of Colombo made the grisly discovery while investigating a strong smell emanating from 111 containers which have been arriving at the docks over the past two years.

Inside the crates, customs officials found the “extremely hazardous” materials mixed in with mattresses, plastics and clinical waste.

It was also reported that human organs and body parts were inside the container, but said it was yet to be approached by the Sri Lankan authorities.

Sri Lanka Customs is also conducting comprehensive investigation into illegal waste along with discarded stock of mattresses importation into Sri Lanka under entrepot trade regulations introduced during previous Rajapaksa regime in 2013 which allows re-exporting rackets of unscrupulous exporters to enjoy tariff relief, customs officers emphasized.

The gazette notification No. 1818-30 issued during the Rajapaksa regime has provided provisions for import and re-export goods without the control of Customs Ordinance, Exchange Control Act, and Import – Export Control Act etc.

These regulations indirectly paved the way for racketeers to exploit its loop holes in manipulating entrepot trade without considering the country’s economic prosperity and environment.

Customs media spokesperson Sunil Jayaratne noted that the main stakeholder is Hayleys Free Zone Private Limited and this company also has the right and legal capacity to enter into agreements with third parties.

He added that as per that contract they had come to an agreement with a company by the name of ETL Colombo Private Ltd and a 4th party by the name of Ceylon Metal Processing Corporation Ltd was also involved.

He revealed that the ETL Colombo Pvt. Ltd was the actual importer of consignments. .

The deal maker was Vengaads in the UK and it is owned by Venkadesha Muthurajan who brought down the waste material from the UK to Sri Lanka.

It has been revealed that Hayley’s Free Zone Company has given subcontract to Metal Processing Corporation Private Limited whose owner is Shashi Kumar Muthurajan.

130 containers have been imported 12 times with 2488 tonnes of waste material and the material is sent back after removing metal and several other things.

The waste material dumped in the port were also to be sent to where the garbage containers were sent in the previous instances.

Finance Minister Mangala Samaraweera has ordered the Director-General of Customs to carry out an investigation and provide a report regarding the waste containers. According to a media release issued by the Finance Ministry, the Minister has made this order today (July 23) after returning to the island.

The media release says if a certain party has violated any law or regulation when it comes to the import of these containers stern action will be taken against those parties.

It has been revealed that certain delays that had taken place at the Attorney General’s Department have been blamed by the Terrorist Investigation Division (TID) as the reason for the delay in arresting National Thowheed Jama'ath (NTJ) Leader Mohammad Zaharan Hashim.

Testifying before the Parliamentary Select Committee (PSC) probing the Easter Sunday attacks, TID Inspector T.R.K.R. Pathirana has blamed the failure on the delays in the Attorney General’s Department in responding to a query by the TID to arrest Zaharan.

Pathirana has said the TID had made an inquiry from the Attorney General’s Department on obtaining a warrant to arrest Zaharan.

“We were monitoring Zaharan and we found that has was engaged in promoting extremism, which is why we wanted action taken against him as well as get the NTJ banned,” IP Pathirana has informed the PSC.

He has further stated before the Committee that the Attorney General’s office had informed him that the file was not in order.

“By the time we got the files in order, the April 21st attacks had already taken place,” IP Pathirana has observed.

According to IP Pathirana, while attempts were made to get the NTJ Facebook page banned, authorities handling the social media network had said they did not understand the content posted on the page since it was in Tamil.

However, the NTJ Facebook page as blocked just 10 days before the Easter Sunday attacks.

The Permanent High Court at Bar has ordered the Attorney General to submit an affidavit before August 09, citing grounds if any, for the request made to issue an arrest warrant on former Governor of the Central Bank of Sri Lanka (CBSL) Arjuna Mahendran.

Mahendran is one of the key suspects in the Central Bank Treasury bond scam case.

The three judge bench comprising Judges Sampath Abeykoon, Sampath Wijeratne and Champa Janaki Rajaratne of the Special High Court has delivered this order.

Appearing on behalf of the AG, Additional Solicitor General Priyantha Nawana had requested the court to issue a warrant to produce Mahendran before court as summons cannot be handed over to him.

Following the request made by the Additional Solicitor General, Special High Court Judge Sampath Abeykoon has stated that certain requirements need to be fulfilled to issue a warrant for a defendant of a case at the earliest opportunity. The judge has made this statement citing Article 73 of the Criminal Procedure Code.

The bench of judges of the Special High Court has ordered the Additional Solicitor General to submit an affidavit citing the reasons for issuing a warrant to arrest the first defendant of the case.

However, the bench of judges has ordered to issue summons to the 10th defendant of the case, Ajahn Gardiye Punchihewa, who is currently living in Singapore and allegedly absconding the court.

Meanwhile, defence attorneys have requested court to issue English and Tamil translations of the indictments filed against Arjun Aloysius, Geoffrey Aloysius, Chitta Ranjan Hulugalle and Muthuraja Surendran citing that their mother tongue is not Sinhalese.

Additional Solicitor General Nawana has also informed court that he would submit the translations requested by the defence.

Sri Lanka has granted approval to issue on-arrival visa to tourists from countries, including India and China, aiming to revive its flagging tourism sector after the deadly Easter bombings.

On July 10, the Sri Lankan government planned to revive the visa on arrival and free visa programme for 39 countries with effect from August 1. But the programme then, however, excluded Sri Lanka's top source markets, namely India and China, according to Colombo page.

The countries included, Austria, Belgium, Bulgaria, Cambodia, Croatia, Cyprus, Czech Republic, Denmark, Estonia, Finland, France, Germany, Greece, Hungary, Ireland, Italy, Latvia, Lithuania, Luxembourg, Malta, Netherlands, Poland, Portugal, Romania, Slovak Republic, Slovenia, Spain, Sweden, United Kingdom, United States of America, Japan, Australia, South Korea, Canada, Singapore, New Zealand, Malaysia, Thailand and Switzerland.

But on Wednesday, Sri Lanka's Tourism Ministry approved the pilot project to issue a free visa on arrival to 10 additional countries, including Denmark, Sweden, Norway, Finland, Iceland, Philippines, Russia, China, India and England.

The visas-on-arrival pilot programme was part of a larger initiative to increase tourist arrivals to the country during the six month off-season period from May to October.

However, the initiative remained suspended indefinitely following the Easter Sunday attacks that rattled several high-end hotels and churches across the country on April 21.

The International Monetary Fund (IMF) has granted waivers for Sri Lanka’s nonobservance relating to the performance criteria on the primary balance of payments and net official international reserves.

Sustaining policy discipline remains critical to strengthen resilience, given still sizable public debt and low external buffers, and support strong and inclusive growth. IMF pointed out.

Government has been directed to take measures focusing on liberalizing trade, improving the business environment and promoting investment, strengthening governance, encouraging female and youth labor force participation, enhancing social protection, and improving crisis preparedness to natural disasters.

Prompt action to advance fiscal consolidation

The Executive Board of the IMF says that despite setbacks, the government took prompt action by advancing fiscal consolidation through a well-targeted 2019 budget, rebuilding reserves, while maintaining a prudent monetary policy under greater exchange rate flexibility, and reviving structural reforms.

"Sustained revenue mobilization is needed to place public debt on a downward path, while making space for critical public investment and an expansion of the social safety net under well-defined selection criteria," the IMF suggested.

Strengthening the selection and appraisal process of large-scale investment projects and assessing their fiscal affordability is critical, given Sri Lanka’s high public debt. Stronger fiscal rules and a medium-term debt management strategy will support medium-term fiscal consolidation and debt reduction efforts, it added.

The IMF urged government authorities to renew their efforts to strengthen SOE governance and transparency, including by advancing a restructuring plan for SriLankan Airlines and completing energy pricing reforms, building on important progress with the implementation of the fuel pricing formula.

Efforts to build reserves should be sustained, under greater exchange rate flexibility, to protect the economy against shocks. Harmonizing regulation and supervision of financial institutions, strengthening the macro prudential policy framework, and enhancing the crisis-preparedness toolkit will help further strengthen financial sector stability. Furthermore, the continued implementation of structural reforms is essential to support strong and inclusive growth.

The Sri Lanka Freedom Party (SLFP) led by President Maithripala has decided to take the necessary steps to hold provincial council (PC) polls before the presidential election.

The decision was reached by the SLFP central committee (CC) last evening when the committee met under the patronage of the President.

SLFP General Secretary, MP Dayasiri Jayasekera has said the party intends to seek a Supreme Court order on holding the presidential election before the provincial council elections. He has further noted that steps would be taken to expedite measures to hold the provincial council elections at the earliest possible time.

According to Jayasekera, it was also decided that the party leadership would discuss the formation of a new alliance with former President, Opposition Leader Mahinda Rajapaksa and to reach a conclusion on the matter.

Sri Lanka’s only state-owned manpower recruiting entity, the Foreign Employment Agency (Pvt) Ltd is losing its market share owing to management weakness and lack of dynamism in the face of high competition from mushrooming job agencies.

Around 1,000 foreign employment agencies are functioning countrywide forcing stiff competition to the state owned agency. However, only 350 agencies have registered with the Association of Licensed Foreign Employment Agencies (ALFEA), official sources said.

According to the statistics of Sri Lanka Bureau of Foreign Employment (SLBFE), 310,786 foreign job opportunities have been received for the country in the year under review (2017/2018).

Out of this number, 427 job opportunities or 0.14 per cent had only been sent abroad by Sri Lanka Foreign Employment Agency (Pvt) Ltd, data showed.

Further, job orders decreased significantly considering the drop in job opportunities by 2211 received in the year under review as compared with the year 2016.

The company has failed to recruit qualified workers for 140,100 and 60 normal job opportunities received from countries such as Jordan, Singapore and Bahrain, respectively in the year under review.

Further, out of 58 technical and professional job opportunities received from Maldives, workers had also not been recruited for 55.

Although job orders had been received from countries like Qatar, Kuwait and Oman, the agency had failed to recruit enough people which resulted in the cancellation of job orders.

The Foreign Employment Agency (Pvt) Ltd has sent only 44 workers via MoUs for jobs mainly to West Asia out of 806 migrants in the year under review, the audit inspection revealed.

According to the SLBFE, ‘job orders’ from foreign countries are sent to the Sri Lankan embassy in that particular country and it is the responsibility of the embassy to check the type of employment being requested and the wages offered for it.

These orders are received by the foreign employment agencies in Sri Lanka, only with their approval, he explained

In the face of declining migrant worker numbers, the Ministry of Foreign Employment is in the process of training workers to fulfill 10,000 vacancies in Japan and a number of European countries, a senior official of the Ministry said adding that the opportunities are mostly in care giving and the construction sector.

However, the training centres run by the SLBFE are running below capacity, although some centres are equipped with modern resources to train large numbers, an onsite inspection revealed.

Sri Lanka needs each and every company and each and every businessman and woman to be setting and sticking to principled standards and practices, and needs them to be holding their employees, customers and suppliers to these.

Competition stimulates innovation and efficiencies, it feeds ideas, it encourages product innovation and higher customer service standards.

These companies and these business leaders should take the lead to help move free trade forward, not hold it back.

This was stated by British High Commissioner in Sri Lanka James Dauris when he addressed the launch of Trade Research Book on Bilateral Trade between Sri Lanka and the UK CBB in Colombo recently.

These companies should hold the politicians and officials they talk to and work with to the same high standards he said,

He urged business leaders and chambers to use their public authority and influence with the government to help press down on permit mentalities and to support the liberalisation of laws and regulations that hold business development back.

He added that the business community needs companies that are leading in their fields to help take forward these changes and support the government with efforts to liberalise the market and make it easier to do business.

Senior business managers and leaders, have key roles to play in holding the government and others to account he said adding that hand in hand with this responsibility goes a responsibility for supporting the government, for sharing the good advice on wise decision-making,.

A couple of much hyped housing programmes for the rural poor mooted by the National Housing Development Authority (NHDA) spearheaded by Minister Sajith Premadasa fail to fulfil the needs of the needy due to improper planning and implementation, government audit inspection unearthed.

The Grama Shakthi Udagammana Programme was slated to kick start at a cost of LKR 250 million and complete 500 houses by the end of 2017/2018 period.

Provisions of LKR 100 million had been made therefore in the year under review and work had commenced with regards to the construction of 1,304 houses.

However, not even a single house had been constructed and completed by the end of the year under review, the government audit concluded.

Another shelter programme of this nature called Welioya Housing Project had been implemented by the National Housing Development Authority at an expenditure of LKR 61 million to build 1,042 houses in the year under review.

The construction of 995 houses had been completed by spending a sum of Rs.57 million for the project.

However, the project had been implemented without a proper study or a search on natural factors such as water resources of the area prior to the commencement of the project. As such, the beneficiaries had left due to lack of water in the area, residents complained.

Sri Lanka’s drug addict rehabilitation programmes are being carried out in snail pace without giving it a priority, despite President Maithripala Sirisena’s action to intensify the combating of drug menace.

President Sirisena is now all-out to eradicate the drug menace from the country threatening drug king pins and narcotics mafia but no action has been taken to revitalize the rehabilitation of drug addicts from its current sorry state, civil society activists said.

A survey by the National Dangerous Drugs Control Board has revealed that 30,000 drug addicts have to be rehabilitated with immediate effect.

The survey revealed that there are about 80,000 drug addicts in the country of which the majority of them are from the Western province.

Colombo and Gampaha districts have a higher number of drug addicts than Kalutara.

The majority of these drug addicts are residents of the North-Western province and along the coastal belt of the island, Survey data showed.

A proposal to set up non-residential rehabilitation centres is still to be implanted although the President is keen to hang drug traffickers and conduct raids to size narcotics and combat drug dealers following the Philippines example.

It has been revealed that the National Dangerous Drugs Control Board had conducted 06 camps for the rehabilitation of drug addicts recently without proper medical guidance.

The Board has obtained the service of a Medical Officer who had not fully registered or temporally registered in the Medical Council for 03 camps.

Analysis of samples of biological specimen for performance enhancing drugs in sports, providing scientific service for judicial proceedings and providing technical service for the Sri Lanka Customs had not been carried out in the year 2017, Auditor Generals report revealed.

Out of these activities, only one activity had been carried out in the year 2016. The analysis carried out to test whether new adulterants are contained in heroin available on the “Street”, was less than 50 per cent, audit report observed.

Education programmes provided by the Drugs and Crimes Prevention Office, preparation of field test kits for the law enforcing institutions in order to identify narcotics and psychotropic substances had been in a very weak level , the report exposed.

The United States Millennium Challenge Corporation (MCC) Sri Lanka Compact has no bearing on land ownership, administration and management in the island, US diplomatic sources said.

The USD 67 million land administration project has an estimated economic rate of return of 30% and aims to expand and improve existing Government of Sri Lanka initiatives to increase the availability of spatial data and land rights information. The project will initially focus on districts in the Central, North-Western, North-Central and Eastern Provinces.

This was disclosed by US Ambassador in Colombo Alaina B. Teplitz appearing in online via the embassy’s social media site out lined current Sri Lanka –USA relations dispelling false propaganda campaign of the opposition recently.

Land activities will help the Government create an inventory of state lands, modernize methods of valuing lands, strengthen tenure security for smallholders, women, and firms, and digitize deeds records so that they are less vulnerable to damage, theft, and loss.

The US Government will not buy, sell, or own any actual land - or take control of any actual land - under this agreement.

Under the land administration project, the land activities will be done in the preparation of parcel fabric map and inventory of state land. improvement of deeds registry, improvements of the land valuation system, land grants registration and deed conversion activity and land policy and legal governance improvement activity.

The above activities will be implemented in 7 districts with the limited funds available for the land sector. Accordingly, these will be implemented in Kegalle, Kandy, Matale, Kurunegala, Anuradhapura, Polonnaruwa and Trincomalee. Furthermore, it is learnt that the US has requested to include Gampaha district as well.