Lawyer Kodituwakku challenges Ravi K over sale of lawmakers’ duty free vehicle permits

By Shanika Sriyananda

Challenging Finance Minister Ravi Karunanayake, who said allegations of MPs selling their duty free car permits are baseless and unfounded, public interest litigation activist and lawyer Nagananda Kodituwakku claimed that newspaper advertisements declaring the sale of parliamentarians’ tax free permits and the sales of vehicles imported through the legislators’ tax free permits offered credible evidence of large-scale fraud.

The activist says that this provides irrefutable evidence of State-sponsored robbery of public funds by dishonest MPs and Ministers who have no regard or respect for the rule of law. 

Kodituwakku has made representations to President Maithripala Sirisena to commence a probe into fraud costing well over Rs. 7 billion in tax revenue. He said all that needed to be done was for the chassis and engine number of the vehicle displayed in the advertisement to be compared with the same information declared in the Customs Declaration. 

 He added that this situation confirmed the breakdown of the rule of law in the country, where politicians were permitted to defy the law.  

“For this vehicle, a Toyota Land Cruiser which was imported recently through an MP tax free permit, the Government has incurred a revenue loss of Rs. 33.5 million,” he said, displaying a Customs Declaration attributed to a ruling party MP. 

Kodituwakku said that law enforcement agencies’ failure to investigate this State-sponsored fraud had encouraged car dealers to advertise vehicles imported with the permits of MPS as everything was set in place for them to indulge in this abuse of Government tax revenue, sharing the huge profit with corrupt politicians in both the ruling party and the Opposition.

 Kodituwakku revealed that he had requested a detailed statement on the vehicles imported with MP tax free permits, yet the Director General of Customs has declined to provide him with the relevant information. 

 He claimed that the Director General is constitutionally responsible to combat abuse of public property (revenue) and to protect and preserve it for the public good (Article 28 Constitution) and not to protect the interests of dishonest politicians. 

«The refusal to cooperate to bring these cheats to book amounts to the intentional violation of the constitutional right conferred on all citizens in terms of Article 14A (1) (b) of the Constitution and Section 3 of the Right to Information Act No. 12 of 2016,» he said, adding that the Director General of Customs would be charged in the Supreme Court soon for the deliberate violation of citizens’ constitutional right to obtain the information requested.