Tuesday, 31 March 2015 04:00
-
- {{hitsCtrl.values.hits}}
Chandra Jayaratne and two others have filed a petition in the Supreme Court for the SC to direct the Monetary Board to carry out an independent investigation into the controversial Central Bank Bond issue. I have no issue with this as Jayaratne can do as he sees fit.
However what I am surprised is that Jayaratne never went to Courts in the past nine years when there were more serious issues.
When the hedging case came up, it was Nihal Amerasekera and Ravi Karunanayake who went to Courts. It was Sujeewa Senasinghe who took the Greek Bond issue to the Bribery Commission. It was Dr. Harsha de Silva and Eran Wickramaratne who took the EPF robbery to the SC. Where was Chandra Jayaratne then? I cannot remember him moving the Supreme Court on the NSB issue where they were trying to buy The Finance Company shares at double the market price.
Now the brave man that he is, he knows that Ranil will not send a white van for him, has gone to the SC to move the Monetary Board to appoint a commission to investigate the Bond issue. Why didn’t he do this earlier to probe frauds under the previous regime?
Was it his fear of the white van or the fact that his brother-in-law was on the Monetary Board?
C. Ramachandra FCA
CB Bond saga and the UNP
There are some obvious features of what is commonly understood by the term insider trading in this whole saga. It is most likely therefore that the investigative committee would recommend some form of action.
In practise though, there are very few insider trading convictions when they are not supported by hard evidence such as phone-taps. The defence usually argues that the so-called inside information was already available to any qualified, diligent, intelligent, hard-working, etc. market professional.
Defence lawyers literally grill prosecution witnesses to establish their case, to highlight a qualitative shortcoming on the part of the witness. The prosecution needs to establish that the information was truly insider. If it fails, a huge damage claim follows. All this is going to happen in the backdrop of the June elections.
Selvaratnam
