News
AG sets up committee to study X-Press Pearl ruling
View(s):By Ranjith Padmasiri
Attorney General Parinda Ranasinghe has appointed a committee comprising two senior officers to study the Supreme Court’s X-Press Pearl disaster judgment that has set out follow-up action for his department
to take.
The committee will take note of the 361-page judgment, where it had also determined that the then-Attorney General had violated the fundamental rights of the petitioners.
It will also study the court’s orders in detail and decide on what the department can do to implement them.
“The decision taken by the (then) Attorney General to institute civil legal action against the X-Press Pearl group of companies in a Singapore court, as opposed to instituting action in the High Court of the Republic of Sri Lanka exercising Admiralty jurisdiction, was an unreasonable, irrational and arbitrary decision and was not in the best interests of Sri Lanka,” the SC had held in its judgment.
The committee will study what prompted the decision to institute civil legal action in Singapore and how to go about instituting a mechanism to obtain compensation ordered by the court.
In its judgment, the SC held the Singapore-registered X-Press Pearl Group, including its local agent, responsible for the disaster and directed them to pay an initial payment of US$ 1 billion as compensation. (Please see Page 14 for a related story.)
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