Editorial Courtesy The Island

The Tilak Marapana committee, appointed by the UNP to study the presidential bond probe commission report, has claimed there are no findings against UNP members including former Minister Ravi Karunanayake, UNP General Secretary and Minister Kabir Hashim tells us. No one with a modicum of intelligence expected a different outcome!

Minister Hashim, however, says the Marapana committee has recommended that Karunanayake desist from functioning as the Assistant Leader of the UNP ‘until a finality is reached by the Attorney General and/or the Bribery Commission that no legal action is to be filed against him’. Whom is it trying to fool?

What we have seen is the first part of the Bond Farce. The presidential commission report has been referred to the Attorney General and the Commission to Investigate Allegations of Bribery or Corruption (CIABOC) to consider whether legal action should be instituted against those named therein, we are told. One may recall how Mervyn Silva, who got into trouble over ‘check kiting’, under the previous government, had an escape route opened via the AG’s Department. He got away with his crime by reaching an agreement with the victim of the fraud! It was only a few weeks ago that an indictment against State Minister Palitha Range Bandara, who had been accused of obtaining money from a businessman in a controversial vehicle deal, was withdrawn. The AG’s Department told the Colombo High Court that the prosecution and Bandara had reached a settlement. That was the end of the case! The UNP wing of the government is peddling an argument that there is no need for anyone to worry because the losses due to bond scams can be recovered from Perpetual Treasuries, whose assets have been frozen. Will some pundit at Hulftsdorp claim that there is no need for legal action as well?

The stage is being set for the Bond Farce II, whose ending is not difficult to guess. It is highly unlikely that anybody will go to jail over the bond scams and only a fraction of the ill-gotten funds will be recovered. For, if the bond racketeers were made to stand trial and thrown to the wolves they wouldn’t take it lying down; they are bound to retaliate by exposing their political masters who masterminded the bond scams and got away with it by blatantly abusing their powers to manipulate the investigative processes.

Meanwhile, doubts have been cast, in some quarters, about the credibility and independence of the institutions, tasked with taking action against the perpetrators of the bond scams. First of all, it needs to be asked whether the Attorney General or the CIABOC has taken action against any prominent yahapalana minister. How many complaints have been made against the incumbent ministers to the CIABOC? And, how many of them have been entertained and/or investigated? Before venturing to consider whether there are grounds for the bond racketeers to be prosecuted, will the AG reveal what has become of the criminal file (No: C/187/161/2015) his department opened on June 30, 2015, on the basis of the findings of a CID investigation into the first bond scam? Will he explain why no criminal action was instituted and the criminal file was subsequently converted into a confidential one (CF/08/2015) before being caused to disappear? How can any person in his or her proper senses be expected to repose his or her trust in the AG’s Department?

Above all, it needs to be found out whether any members of the outfits that probed the bond scams have had links to the UNP and/or provided professional services to that party in the past and, if so, whether their political connections led to a conflict of interest on their part and affected their neutrality and impartiality in carrying out the task assigned to them. Their observations, findings and recommendations smack of a bias and make one wonder whether they have compromised their professional integrity and gone out of their way to clear certain politicians of wrongdoing. These are some of the issues that need to be raised in Parliament when it takes up the bond scam report for debate next week. But, we know we are only hoping against hope in that the cantankerous Opposition notables, pretending to be carrying out frontal attacks against the beleaguered UNP over the bond scams, are also compromised beyond redemption. They themselves have skeletons in their cupboards, which look like catacombs. They and the UNP are like President Donald Trump and the Rocket Man of North Korea threatening to push the much-dreaded nuclear buttons on their desks but baulking at doing so for fear of MAD (mutually assured destruction).