The petitioner alleged that first Respondent Ranil Wickremesinghe held, as at the time of the Parliamentary Elections held on August 17, 2015, a financial interest in several contracts entered into by public corporations on behalf of the Republic of Sri Lanka with his family company “Lake House Printers and Publishers PLC”, by virtue of his having been a major shareholder of the said company.
Colombo, Dec 12 (newsin.asia) – Sri Lanka’s Parliament, on Wednesday passed a vote of confidence on ousted Prime Minister Ranil Wickremesinghe with 117 lawmakers in the 225 member Parliament voting in favor of it. The vote was taken as Mahinda Rajapaksa and parliamentarians loyal to him boycotted sessions for the third consecutive week, alleging that […]
Colombo, Dec 12 (newsin.asia) – Sri Lanka’s Supreme Court, on Wednesday re-fixed for Friday, a petition filed by challenged Prime Minister Mahinda Rajapaksa over an interim order which temporarily suspended him and his cabinet from functioning as a government, local media reports said. Rajapaksa, on Dec 4 had filed a petition in the Supreme Court […]
Colombo, Dec 12 (newsin.asia) – The following are the foreign exchange rates against the Sri Lankan rupee released by the Central Bank of Sri Lanka on Wednesday. Buying Selling Australian Dollar 126.66 132.09 Canadian Dollar 131.57 136.52 Chinese Yuan (Renminbi) 25.42 26.64 Euro 199.39 206.52 Japanese Yen 1.5511 1.6088 Singapore […]
Hindutvic rhetoric will have to be matched by performance on the economic front if it is to be effective because Hindutva can only be icing on the cake as past experience shows.But extremist and ideologically driven parties like the BJP do not set out of the established line and think anew. Therefore the BJP will continue to favor the big corporations; hope that the middle classes will be taken care of by mesmerizing Hindutvic and nationalistic rhetoric; and the farmers will be silenced by promises of higher Minimum Support Prices – all policies which have failed to deliver the goods.
In case the Supreme Court allows parliament to be dissolved (as desired by President Sirisena), the draft constitution prepared by committees appointed by the dissolved parliament will have to be abandoned. Assuming that members of the new parliament are sufficiently interested in having a new constitution, the entire process will have to re-started from scratch.
Since Narendra Modi came to power in May 2014, a series of top government economic personnel have quit. The list is long considering the fact that the Modi regime is only four years old. Those who have quit so far are two Reserve Bank of India (RBI) Governors, Raghuram Rajan and Urjit Patel; a Vice Chairman of the NITI Aayog, Arvind Panagariya, and a Chief Economic Adviser, Arvind Subramanian. Anyone watching the Modi government’s handling of economic affairs would know that the stated reasons for quitting and the sweetly worded tweets were but attempts to hide the ugly truth that these eminent men were unable to work under Modi’s crassly political agenda set by the Rashtriya Swayamsewak Sangh (RSS).
Colombo, Dec 11 (newsin.asia) – The following are the foreign exchange rates against the Sri Lankan rupee released by the Central Bank of Sri Lanka on Tuesday. Buying Selling Australian Dollar 126.18 131.60 Canadian Dollar 131.18 136.12 Chinese Yuan (Renminbi) 25.30 26.52 Euro 199.74 206.88 Japanese Yen 1.5545 1.6123 Singapore […]
As political uncertainty continues in Sri Lanka after President Maithripala Sirisena sacked the then Prime Minister Ranil Wickremesinghe on October 26 plunging the country into a constitutional crisis, Sri Lankans hold divergent views and positions on the manner in which their leaders have behaved. The takes of ordinary Sri Lankans—Sinhalese, Tamils and Muslims—vary from scathing remarks to total support for some of the principal political actors, including Sirisena and Rajapaksa who was ‘appointed’ as PM in place of Wickremesinghe.
Sri Lankan political parties representing minority communities like the North-Eastern Tamils, Indian Origin Tamils and Muslims, appear to have lost faith in the Presidential system, with a directly elected President wielding enormous executive powers.
They also vehemently oppose President Maithripala Sirisena’s proposal to tweak the 19 th.Constitutional Amendment to enhance his powers in the guise of removing some procedural anomalies in the legislation.