Fresh crisis for UNP as Ravi quits Nomination Board

Thursday, 6 February 2014 00:06 - - {{hitsCtrl.values.hits}}

The United National Party was plunged into internal crisis as the nomination period for the Western and Southern PC elections ended yesterday, with the Party’s Colombo District Chief Organiser Ravi Karunanayake resigning from its nomination board following a dispute over the selection

of candidates to contest on the UNP ticket. In a letter to UNP Leader Ranil Wickremesinghe, Karunanayake charges that the Leader had made arbitrary decisions in the process of selecting candidates to contest the polls. Karunanayake, who said he was disappointed by the process, said that while he had been confident that the UNP would win elections in the Colombo District at the WPC election, acknowledged he was no longer certain that would be the case. Karunanayake, who said he had walked out of a meeting of the UNP Nominations Board on 3 February expressing his disagreement, claimed the Party had ignored experienced local activists in the Colombo District and “appointed candidates who had come from nowhere to contest”. He said that a decision had been arbitrarily been taken by Wickremesinghe to refrain from consulting Colombo District organisers when selecting candidates, even though this would be the case with all other districts. “I consider this an arbitrary decision taken against the unity of the Colombo District Organisation and the democratic principles on which the United National Party has been built upon,” Karunanayake wrote in his letter. The UNP Parliamentarian said that he had made the decision to resign from the Nomination Board to express solidarity with the Colombo District Organisers. (DB)