JO raps Govt. over controversial gazette

By Ashwin Hemmathagama

The UPFA Joint Opposition (JO) parliamentary group yesterday criticised the Government for publishing a controversial gazette as part of facilitating the Sri Lanka-Singapore FTA that was not tabled in Parliament or made publicly available.

Revealing the basis of the alleged conspiracy theory, the JO member MP Bandula Gunawardana charged the Unity Government for allowing the world to rob Sri Lanka through an unfair free trade pack. “The Government gazette No.2069/2 of 1 May was limited in circulation with the intension to keep out any interested party from knowing the real facts of the agreement and the long list of items that received tax exemptions. The gazette was not tabled in the Parliament nor made available on the Government Printer’s website for the public. We were able to find a few copies with a paper pasted on the preamble to give a different opinion about the entire process and also to make it impossible to identify the gazette from any other document,” charged MP Gunawardana.

According to MP Gunawardana, many of the goods and services listed in the gazette are questionable and mostly restricted, controlled, or protected by local laws. “The Sri Lanka–Singapore Free Trade Agreement opens the Pandora’s box for the world to take out our bio-diversity through Singapore. The agreement is worse than the Kandyan Declaration signed with the British to handover the island. We are in the process of challenging the agreement at the Supreme Court,” he added.

JO member MP Anura Priyadharshana Yapa said: “The Sri Lanka–Singapore Free Trade Agreement is written in a subtle manner, allowing Singapore to have some automatic benefit over any other agreement Sri Lanka would enter with any other country in the future.

 Most importantly, most of the items we import from Singapore with levy tax on them are allowed to be imported free of tax. This will have an impact on the local industries.”

The unhappy MPs also highlighted that they only received the English copy of the agreement, which was referred as the base for any translation and the Government skipped giving them copies in Sinhala and Tamil. “By skipping the translations, the Government has wilfully limited the number of people who would get to know the damage they have caused to the motherland, allowing the world to rob Sri Lanka. We requested the Speaker to provide us copies in the local languages. Our requests were not honoured. We have decided to challenge this at the Supreme Court as well,” said MP Gunawardana.