Pandora’s Box: Plus ça change

Sri Lankans have once more featured in explosive leaked documents running into the millions that have uncovered the financial secrets of 35 current and former world leaders and more than 330 politicians in 91 countries and exposed a shadow economy thriving in offshore or secret jurisdictions.

The files, titled the ‘Pandora Papers,’ were exposed by the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists names individuals who used offshore accounts and shell companies to conceal millions of dollars and in many cases, to shield them from the taxman.

Prominent member of the current ruling family, Nirupama Rajapaksa and her husband, Thirukumar Nadesan feature on the ICIJ’s ‘Power Players’ list. The documents reveal that Rajapaksa and Nadesan together controlled a shell company used to buy luxury apartments in London and Sydney and art, using these entities to make investments. Based on the Pandora Papers, Nadesan had is said to have set up other shell companies and trusts in secrecy jurisdictions, and he used them to obtain lucrative consulting contracts from foreign companies doing business with the Sri Lankan Government and to buy artwork.

“In confidential emails to Asiaciti Trust, a Singapore-based offshore services provider, a long-time adviser of Nadesan’s put his overall wealth, as of 2011, at more than $ 160 million,” the ICIJ reported, with the disclaimer that the figure could not be independently verified. At the time Nadesan had amassed this wealth, his wife and Rajapaksa relative, was serving as Deputy Minister of Water Supply and Drainage under President Mahinda Rajapaksa.

Politically connected Sri Lankans have routinely made these global corruption lists. In 2016, the ICIJ Panama Papers expose named the Chairman of Avant Garde Ltd. as one Sri Lankan entity to have siphoned enormous amounts of money into offshore accounts. Several other individuals associated with this company were also listed in the Panama papers. 

Last year the UK’s Serious Fraud Office (SFO) discovered a massive financial fraud by Airbus Industries which exposed that the airline company had paid huge bribes to SriLankan Airlines officials between July 2011 and June 2015 to finalise an aircraft procurement deal completely unfavourable to the National Carrier. The UK investigation found that Airbus Company had transferred $ 2 million into a Singaporean bank account registered to SriLankan Airlines CEO Kapila Chandrasena’s wife. Both Chandrasena and his wife were remanded in February 2020 and released on bail one month later. The massive corruption case has gone nowhere since. Investigations are promised when these revelations are made, and soon amount to nothing more than hollow platitudes.

Almost every week, there is a new corruption scandal in Sri Lanka. Sugar, coconut oil, garlic, our ports and airports, our highways, railways, and bridges are mired in corruption scandals. Every new Government finds new and more outrageous ways to rob the people – and yet election after election, Sri Lankans put them back in charge of the State coffers. The 2019 return of the Rajapaksa family, mired in unprecedented corruption scandals during its first term of office, is a case in point.

What the Panama Papers and the Pandora Papers and the Serious Fraud Office have revealed with facts and figures is a truth Sri Lankans have known all along – that their political and corporate elite are corrupt at their core, engaged in a tireless effort that spans generations and governments to bleed the country dry. Far more troubling and symptomatic of deep malaise is the public’s continued acceptance of this status quo. There is barely a murmur of public protest when individuals known for corruption benefit through Government contracts and political patronage. The first-time corruption brought a government down in Sri Lanka was in 2015. When the new dispensation showed little improvement, rather than look to break a pattern, the electorate voted to return the old crooks they had booted out only four years ago. Decent candidates with integrity and passion for public service rarely stand a chance in Sri Lankan electoral politics.

This apathy and fatalist public resignation only breeds corruption, the cancer in Sri Lanka’s body politic that is eating it alive. ICIJ’s Pandora’s Box might be full of dangerous secrets, but it will ring in no change in Sri Lanka at least, until it matters enough to sway the public at the ballot box.