News
Cabinet ministers to use predecessors’ fleet
View(s):- No new vehicles for ministers and Govt. MPs
By Damith Wickramasekara
Cabinet and deputy ministers will use official vehicles used by ministers in the previous government, while all other government MPs will also be given an official “non-luxury, fuel-efficient” vehicle, a senior government official told the Sunday Times.
This means that all 159 government MPs will each have an official vehicle of some sort.
The official said the ministers and deputy ministers would be using vehicles allocated by their respective ministries to previous ministers who oversaw these ministries. “They will not be given new vehicles but will have the ones used and returned by their predecessors,” he added.
The official defended the move to provide all other government MPs with an official vehicle, noting that the MPs are required to travel extensively to and from Colombo to their respective districts for government activities. However, none of these MPs would be provided with “V8-type luxury vehicles,” the official said.
He revealed that they had identified 344 government vehicles that were “difficult to maintain.”
These include luxury vehicles such as V8s, vehicles that need extensive and costly repairs, and ones that have been deemed far too costly for the State to maintain. Accordingly, the plan is to publicly auction these vehicles and use the proceeds to buy vehicles for government MPs who are not ministers.
The primary requirement when allocating vehicles to government MPs was fuel efficiency, the official said, adding that fuel-guzzling luxury vehicles would not be bought for anyone. In the event funds obtained from auctioning existing vehicles were not enough, talks were also underway with the Presidential Secretariat on the possibility of releasing some vehicles in the Secretariat’s vehicle pool to new MPs, the official said.
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