ගෝල්ඩන් ක්රෙඩිට් අර්බුදයෙන් රට උගත යුතු පාඩම්
The Ceylinco crisis will hurt more than its owners — depositors’ lives are ruined and employees face losing their jobs, and the damage runs back into the economy. Golden Key took public deposits without registering with the Central Bank, which shows the rule of law is as absent in the private sector as anywhere else. Depositors were not uneducated people; they attended to the high interest rate and ignored the risk, never asking how a rate above the commercial banks could be paid at all. Ivan asks how a monthly package of 6.5 million rupees and six luxury vehicles can be called a salary, and whether those drawing it could not see whose flesh they were living on. When politicians plunder the state and eminent men in the private sector plunder their own depositors, the country has no good future. Golden Key attended to quantity and not quality — the same fault that has damaged tea and education.
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.
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.
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.
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.
සහල් අර්බුදය
Rice disappeared from the market as soon as a controlled price was set. Ivan explains why — no paddy left in the marketing board, buying entirely through private traders, and no reason for a miller to sell below what he paid — adds the floods and the export restrictions in the rice-growing countries, and argues the moment is an opening for agriculture rather than only a shortage.
ජීවන වියදම් ගින්නෙන් දැවෙන ජනතාව
Ivan lays out the year’s price rises item by item from the agriculture department’s own figures — red raw rice from 39.34 rupees a kilo to over 70, samba to over 80, a coconut from 19 to 45, dhal from 86.48 to 160 — and asks what relief the government intends. His answers are practical: put uncultivated land to use, encourage home gardens, control crop damage by monkeys, and find something for those living on wages alone.
Where did the Bribery & Corruption Commission Go Wrong?
Responding to the removal of the Bribery Commission’s Director General Piyasena Ranasinghe, Ivan argues the Commission was already a failed institution. He cites its handling of Mangala Samaraweera’s credit cards and the Public Trustee inquiry, retired judges as commissioners, the lack of any oversight, and the career of Rienzie Arsakularatne, and proposes a body to inspect the Commission itself.
චෞර රැජිනගේ රසකථා
Reading Upul Joseph Fernando’s interview with Chandrika Kumaratunga in Lankadeepa, Ivan takes apart the picture of a poor and blameless former president whose children travel by bus. She names two mistakes she knew were mistakes when she made them, and Ivan supplies the reason she does not: the appetite for power inside a system she and Ranil Wickremesinghe built between them.
සෝමවංශ සේ ම වීරවංශ ද
The argument inside the JVP matters, Ivan writes, because until it began the party’s spokesmen described it as the cleanest in the country. He reads the sources — Nandana Gunathilaka’s series, Somawansa’s speech at the 1971 commemoration, Weerawansa’s answer in parliament — and works back through the party’s money to the years when its leaders needed intermediaries and protection.