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Home » ColumnsCrucial court verdict today on West Asian secret account of VVIP’s son
Ruling on case involving half a billion dollars seen as opening the door to full-scale probe on massive corrupt deals While Ukraine goes slow on MiG probe, top agencies help Sri Lanka make breakthrough; new twists in Avant Garde story Full two-day parliamentary debate on Geneva issue; minister says ‘domestic inquiry with foreign participation’ A [...]
Poetic justice and putrid politics
My dear Janaka Bandara, I thought I should write to you when I heard that you had suddenly been remanded for an offence that you had allegedly committed more than fifteen years ago. Honestly, I was both shocked and surprised to hear about this because although you had been in the news recently, it was [...]
President slashes New York bill
When he was in New York for the UN General Assembly sessions last month, President Sirisena was apparently mindful of the stories in this column about the extravagant spending by successive delegations when former President Mahinda Rajapaksa was in New York. No porno movies, no overseas calls (except to Geneva where Sri Lanka was negotiating [...]
Increased taxation vital to decrease fiscal deficit
The sudden imposition of excise duties last week was not surprising. The deteriorating fiscal situation this year made such taxation measures inevitable. These unplanned and unimaginative excise duty hikes, together with the finance bills presented to parliament, were financial patchwork for the government’s fiscal survival. What is needed is not such unplanned taxation to tide [...]
A story of fierce courage from Vishvamadhu
In a ‘letter to the editor’ of a Sri Lankan national newspaper recently, someone pointed to the need for a fearless Atticus Finch to emerge from post-war Sri Lanka. Conflicted by race This was a nostalgic beckoning of Pulitzer prize-winning author Harper Lee’s iconic portrayal of a small-town white lawyer in ‘To Kill a Mockingbird’ [...]
A matter of life (in prison) or death left hanging in the air
“Capital punishment is a subject on which men (and women) tend to feel strongly, to be swayed by emotional prejudices and to argue dogmatically. It is also a subject of greater complexity than is generally supposed.” These are the words contained in the concluding chapter of the Report of the Commission on Capital Punishment published [...]
Ranil’s salvo targets our diplomats
While it could be anticipated that the prime minister would chose India for his first official visit, the intriguing question was where he would go next. Would he turn west or east? As it happened he turned east but not to visit China, as many expected but to Japan, a country with which Ranil Wickremesinghe’s [...]
Police make a pig’s breakfast of Seya’s murder investigation
What magic dances in the batons of Lanka’s police that move those they arrest on suspicion to willingly spill the beans, the whole beans and nothing but the beans and sign damning confessions to gruesome murder? Especially when scientific tests subsequently done on their gene samples cast doubts upon the veracity of their admissions made [...]