Bond Commission to go online: Rajitha

Thursday, 11 January 2018 00:00 - - {{hitsCtrl.values.hits}}

By Chathuri Dissanayake

The Government is exploring the possibility of releasing the Bond Commission report online to grant the public access to it, said Cabinet Co-spokesperson Rajitha Senaratne.

Highlighting that it was the first time a Presidential Commission Report had been made public on such a large scale, Senaratne told journalists at the weekly Cabinet briefing that the delay in tabling the document in Parliament was due to the advice given by the Attorney General’s (AG) Department.

“The President was told that the Central Bank and the Commission to Investigate Allegations of Bribery and Corruption (CIABOC) should be sent the report before it was tabled in Parliament. So he was going by that. But yesterday at the party leaders’ meeting the Prime Minister clarified saying that was wrong, as the Central Bank comes under him and the CIABOC under the Parliament. He told the AG that the report could be tabled in Parliament,” he said.

Further, he said the release would take time as the 1,400-page report would have to be translated into Sinhala and Tamil.

To avoid the delay caused, the President gave a summary of the report through his statement last week, outlining the recommendations given.

However, Minister Senaratne found fault with the style of inquiry followed by the Commission. He claimed that the Commission should have focused on conducting a forensic audit with the help of both local and foreign experts.

“The Commission should have enlisted the support of foreign experts who know the matter well. They should have found out what the loss was, how much of money the public has lost. The focus should have been on the losses to the country, not who bought houses,” he told journalists at the weekly Cabinet briefing.

The Minister criticised the way the inquiry was held by the commissioners who presented their final report last week.

The Minister pointed out that further investigation was needed to uncover the deals brokered by Mahinda Rajapaksa’s regime, where over Rs. 4,000 billion has been lost to the Government.

“This is only Rs. 11 billion, what about the Rs. 4,000 billion that was lost during previous regime. There should be investigations into that,” he said.