• Pro-Rajapaksa faction wants legal action against Arjuna Mahendran and Arjun Aloysius

• Complaint urges Bribery Commission to determine if PM was involved in alleged scam

• JO MP Rambukwella says bond scam was ‘meticulously planned’ 

By Dharisha Bastians 

The simmering Central Bank Treasury bond scandal remained in focus yesterday, with Opposition legislators filing a bribery complaint against incumbent Prime Minister Ranil Wickremesinghe and the bank’s former Governor Arjuna Mahendran. 

MPs from the pro-Rajapaksa Joint Opposition faction filed an official complaint at the Commission to Investigate Allegations of Bribery or Corruption (CIABOC), demanding an investigation into the alleged Treasury bond scam and citing the Prime Minister and ex- Governor Mahendran as suspects in the controversial transaction.

In its complaint, the Joint Opposition MPs requested the Bribery Commission to determine whether Prime Minister Wickremesinghe was involved in the scandal, and recommended that steps be taken to appropriate all profits made from the controversial bond transaction back to the state. The JO complaint calls for legal action to be taken against ex-CBSL Governor Mahendran and his son-in-law Arjun Aloysius, a director in the holding company that owns Perpetual Treasuries. 

There was no immediate response from the Prime Minister’s office about the new complaint. 

A parliamentary oversight committee last week found Mahendran was “directly responsible” for the dubious bond transaction in February 2015 that allowed a company linked to his son-in-law to rake in approximately Rs. 10 billion in profits through bond auctions conducted by the Central Bank over a two-year period. 

The Committee on Public Enterprises, chaired by Opposition Legislator Sunil Handunetti, recommended legal action against Mahendran and other Central Bank officials implicated in the scandal. 

Speaking to Daily FT, Joint Opposition MP Keheliya Rambukwella said the Treasury bond scandal was a “meticulously planned daylight robbery.”

Rambukwella said that the Joint Opposition had named the Prime Minister as a suspect in its complaint, because of the events leading up to the alleged bond scam on 27 February 2015. “The Prime Minister first of all assigned the Central Bank as a subject under his Ministry in January 2015. So he was Minister in charge when the bond transaction happened. In February he brings in a foreign and places him at the head of the Central Bank. Two weeks later, the bond scam happens. So this was clearly well-planned,” Rambukwella explained at length in an interview last night. 

The former Minister, who is a loyalist of former President Mahinda Rajapaksa, said Governor Mahendran could not hold office as a public servant because he was a Singaporean citizen and could not pledge allegiance to the Constitution of Sri Lanka. “He violated the Constitution by never taking oaths and he admits this before the COPE that was chaired by D.E.W. Gunasekera.” 

Singapore does not permit its citizens to hold dual nationality. 

Last morning, Joint Opposition lawmakers Rambukwella, Mahindananda Aluthgamage, Janaka Bandara Tennakoon, Vasudeva Nanayakkara, Bandula Gunawardana, Weerakumara Dissanayaka, Vidura Wickremanayaka, D.V. Chanaka, Kanchana Jayasekara arrived at the Bribery Commission to lodge their complaint.

The last time that a serious complaint of alleged financial irregularity was filed against a sitting Prime Minister was in 2005, when the CID fraud squad investigated a complaint that then Premier Mahinda Rajapaksa had misappropriated tsunami aid, in what became widely known as the ‘Helping Hambantota’ case. 

Joint Opposition MP and Pivithuru Hela Urumaya (PHU) Leader Udaya Gammanpila also attempted to step up the pressure yesterday, calling for the Prime Minister’s resignation over the scandal and threatening to bring a no-confidence motion against Wickremesinghe if he failed to step down. 

The most recent no-confidence motion against Finance Minister Ravi Karunanayake brought by the Joint Opposition was roundly defeated earlier this year, with coalition partners the UNP and the SLFP putting up a unified front.