Chartered accountants meet State Minister Cabraal | Page 2 | Sunday Observer

Chartered accountants meet State Minister Cabraal

6 September, 2020
From left: Dinesh Dharmadasa, President, CA Sri Lanka, Manil Jayesinghe, State Minister Ajith Nivard Cabraal, Indrajith Fernando and Shirantha Peiris.
From left: Dinesh Dharmadasa, President, CA Sri Lanka, Manil Jayesinghe, State Minister Ajith Nivard Cabraal, Indrajith Fernando and Shirantha Peiris.

A delegation, of the Institute of Chartered Accountants met State Minister for Finance, Capital Market and State Enterprise Reform, Ajith Nivard Cabraal recently to  express their support for him, a fellow Chartered Accountant, in his future endeavours in the legislative body.

Cabraal said that the SLPP is a party that has already identified the people’s pressing needs and issues, and are not ‘suppliers of jokes and tall stories’ as the past so called Yahapalana regime was.

He said that the Yahapalana period is an asset for the new government’s project, because the people have given value to what he and the government of the day did for a Suba Anagathayak — prosperous future — before 2015, by contrasting that time with what the failed Yahapalana did.

Cabraal in the context of the launch of his book on the Bond Scam cover up in Sinhala, in particular, said that the JVP or many of the others who were slandering him on the pre 2015 bond issues in the Central Bank (CBSL), and other matters concerning his time at the helm of the bank,  are unable to meet him and ask him any real questions based on the allegations they make.

He said that he has always been in the country and had not gone into hiding, but still finds that those who point fingers at him are unable to come up with one credible allegation that he is unable to answer to, or disprove. On the contrary, he said, the people who come up to him at various forums and meetings, tell him that they now have a better appreciation of what the Central Bank did in his tenure during the Suba Anagathayak regime, in contrast to what the Central Bank was up to in the tenure of the disastrous Yahapalanaya government.

“The people tell me that the rupee was doing better, that the interest rates were much more positive to economic growth than in the Yahapalana interregnum,” he said. A Sinhala translation of the book, The Bond Scam Cover Up — the Mother of all Cover Ups will be launched soon. Among other things, the book exposes how the so-called forensic audit was commissioned by the perpetrators of the scam as another ‘investigation’ that was aimed at exonerating the perpetrators of the scam. The so-called forensic audit, set back the Sri Lankan taxpayer by a staggering Rs. 1,500 million.

Certain Assistant Governors of the CBSL aligned to the former premier assisted in the task of trying to obfuscate the issue, and attempted to lay blame for imagined failures of the CBSL, on former governor Cabraal.

Almost all members of the former Monetary Board are compromised and may in some way be involved in the cover up of the bond scam, by acts such as commissioning the so-called forensic audit, he said. Minister Cabraal said all actors who were part of the scam should be brought to book, and not just those of Perpetual Treasuries and that monies embezzled should be recovered.

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