ගෝල්ඩන් කී අර්බුදය
Golden Key Credit Card’s failure to pay interest on time has brought depositors to its door and shaken the whole Ceylinco group. The Central Bank has removed Seylan Bank’s board and placed it temporarily under Bank of Ceylon control. Golden Key took deposits and paid 30 per cent annual interest without being a registered financial business — funding those returns, it appears, by lending depositors’ money to Ceylinco property companies, which collapsed with the property market. Ten thousand depositors are owed some 25 billion rupees; the company’s eye hospital, teak plantation and Kirimandala Mawatha land cannot be liquidated quickly and would not cover it anyway. Ivan notes the chief administrative officer’s monthly package of 6.5 million rupees and six luxury vehicles, and argues such payments are extortion rather than salary. He divides depositors into three kinds, the third being people whose money could not safely be placed in a lawful institution.
2009 වසර හා දේශපාලන අංක ගණිතය
Ivan opens 2009 expecting the global collapse to hit Sri Lanka hard. The year begins with the Golden Key crisis dragging the rest of Ceylinco’s finance companies down, tea, cinnamon and rubber in unprecedented difficulty, and smallholders who once earned well unable to live. War spending for 2009 is 177 billion rupees, and the country must fight through an economic crisis it cannot abandon the war to escape. At Kilinochchi the army advances slowly through bunds, trenches and traps, its target the LTTE’s war machine rather than territory. Meanwhile a run of court rulings against the government, above all on fuel prices, had trapped it politically — until it escaped by cutting fuel, gas and official expenses in one package worth 16 billion rupees, and put the opposition on the defensive instead. Ranil is the better mathematician; Mahinda is the better political arithmetician.
Can the Political System be changed by way of Court Orders?
The Supreme Court under Chief Justice Sarath N. Silva now rules against the executive, and the public is pleased. Ivan sets this against the court’s record — the stay order on the impeachment motion, the JSC petition, and five years of turning away petitions to implement the 17th Amendment before Sumanasiri Liyanage’s succeeded — and argues that only changing the political system will last.
Queen of Deceit Found Guilty
On 8 October 2008 the Supreme Court returned to the UDA 224 acres vested in Asia Golf Company under former President Chandrika Kumaratunga, the Waters Edge case. Ivan uses the judgment to set out how the political system pays supporters and financiers out of public property, and argues that it establishes a public-trust principle future presidents must heed.
Mahinda’s Anti-Tiger War and the Future of the Tamil People
With the army closing on Kilinochchi, Ivan asks what the war means for the Tamil people. No government can concede a separate state or confederation, he argues, and the traditional homeland claim blocks negotiation. He sets the LTTE’s military strength against its political failures and asks who benefits from the war.
Weerawansa, as Well as Somawansa, is a Bequest of Wijeweera
Written as the JVP split between Wimal Weerawansa and Somawansa Amarasinghe, the piece argues both sides inherit habits Rohana Wijeweera built into the party: raising money from businessmen, hiring out the party’s services and hiding its finances. Ivan recounts what the businessman Yasasiri Kasthuriaratchi told him about his dealings with Wijeweera.
වඩා වැදගත් කවුද?
Ivan discovered on a Friday that most of Ravaya’s ten-member editorial board are Marxists of one school or another. From there he argues the case against: the socialist experiments that failed, Pol Pot’s regime killing people for wearing sunglasses, Wijeweera’s two attempts at armed seizure — and sets against them the India Gandhi made, the largest democracy on earth, beside which he thinks Marx looks small.
සමාජ අධ්යාත්මය ඝාතනය කරනු ලැබුවෝ කවුද?
Learning from experience is what separates people from animals, Ivan writes, and Sri Lankan society — literate, pleasant, clean — is at the bottom of the table for it. He tells of showing three professional visitors the published lists of office-holders under two governments, between 86 and 103 in each, and their astonishment; and asks what half-killed the country’s social spirit and what would revive it.
ගෘහ සේවය වෙනුවට හෙද සේවය
Training nurses rather than exporting housemaids is the best thing the health minister has done, Ivan writes, and Ravaya argued for it as far back as 1994. Nursing is respected here, pays several times what domestic service abroad pays, and Kerala and the Philippines have built industries on it — and the same case can be made for masons, carpenters, welders, tilers and electricians.
නැගෙනහිර ඡන්දය
The Eastern provincial council election is a turning point in the ethnic conflict, held in the territory the LTTE claimed while the war against it goes on. Ivan works through the demography district by district — no community holds a majority in the province — and the 2004 parliamentary results party by party, and shows why the chief ministership is the point of the dispute.