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Wednesday, 25 November 2015 00:28 - - {{hitsCtrl.values.hits}}
From left: PriceWaterhouseCoopers Director Tax Services Charmaine Tillekeratne, Softlogic Holdings Chairman Ashok Pathirage, Sunshine Holdings Group Managing Director Vish Gowindasamy, Former Central Bank Deputy Governor W.A. Wijewardena, Hemas Holdings CEO Steven Enderby, Moderator Daily FT Editor Nisthar Cassim Finance Minister Ravi Karunanayake, Colombo University MBA Alumni’s President Lalith Sumanasiri, John Keells Holdings Deputy Chairman Ajit Gunewardene, Carson Cumberbatch Director Mano Selvanathan, Aitken Spence Director Parakrama Dissanayake, Hayleys Director Sarath Ganegoda, CT Holdings Deputy Chairman and CEO Ranjit Page and Expolanka Holdings Director Sanjay Kulatunga – Pix by Daminda Harsha Perera
By Uditha Jayasinghe and Shehana Dain
Condensing Budget 2016 to its core values, Finance Minister Ravi Karunanyake yesterday reiterated it aims to create “billions of billionaires” in its capacity for competitiveness and competence in giving the private sector an unprecedented opportunity to expand into new sectors and improve growth.
Attending the Daily FT and the Colombo University MBA Alumni Association held under the title ‘Budget 2016 goes under the scanner,’ for the sixth consecutive year, Karunanayake was intensely upbeat on the fresh scope provided by the Budget and confident it would meet its targets.
“What we thought was we will take one big jump in the deep end and give the people the opportunity to really showcase their competence. We want to see small and medium enterprises come up, we don’t want to make one or two billionaires, we want to make billions of billionaires, that’s the concept that we want to promote,” noted. The Finance Minister was also bullish of the economic opportunities opened up by Budget 2016 insisting it would give fresh incentive for the private sector to improve in expertise and ideas. International best practices would also be adapted and followed by the Government, he stressed. “We have taken the restrictions away; we basically want to emulate certain success stories from around the world. We want to regain our advantages. Geographically we are in the best location, we are giving an opportunity to make the maximum out of it, so we have opened up new sectors, and we are giving the chance for foreign investors to plough their money in to our economy rather than investing elsewhere. You can have a 200% return here,” he added.
The proposed financial hub would be a key component of the Budget and Karunanayake encouraged key business leaders and hundreds of other stakeholders present at the seminar to make the most of these fresh opportunities offered by the Budget.
“We are planning to showcase Sri Lanka in the finance sector. We are focusing on getting this moving by April, we already have 37 banks and we believe there will be another 15-17 banks coming in and that will be a vibrant offshore banking as well as financial hub. We have opened up our services sector. We want tourism numbers to increase so we are planning to open shopping malls and introduce competitive pricing. We want companies to play the numbers game.”
The Minister defended the reduction in taxes of essential items as a measure to safeguard voters and insisted Government intervention was necessary because extortion takes place in the import and transfer of basic goods. He also repeated the faith invested in the private sector and public to work together to take advantage of the fresh break before them.
“We have invested in the confidence of our people to take the opportunity. Take the risk that is there. If you investment a million or two that will have a multiply effect and the first opportunity has been given to you. We want to encourage foreign investors to have projects in Sri Lanka. Don’t miss the opportunity to show the ability you have.” For full report see Thursday’s paper.
