e-Con e-News

blog: eesrilanka.wordpress.com

‘Before you study the economics, study the economists!’

e-Con e-News 30 March – 05 April 2025

The notorious King Leopold II of Belgium, as a young Duke of Brabant, rode the first English train in Ceylon from Veyangoda to Ambepussa and back to Colombo, drawn by an imported English locomotive engine in 1864. But more importantly, as English Queen Victoria’s first cousin, Leopold enabled the mass murder and enslavement of the Congo people to extract their palm oil for William Hesketh Lever, who created the Huileries du Congo Belge (HCB), a subsidiary of the soap-manufacturing Lever Brothers Co.

     Unilever, of course, is a major if not the principal lubricator of the media & the public relations (aka advertising & marketing) companies that sustain misinformation & disinformation in Sri Lanka. It is they who, unfortunately, provide the nation with our daily mental bubble gum & bile plus the deities & demons, who appear to switch places with every government that is elected with great hope and then overthrown with great distaste. Whatever great changes or chaos, or big talk and broken promises, it turns out that the old imperial plantation system bestowed by the likes of Unilever, and more recently the IMF, carries on regardless…

     It is Unilever (actually their former CEO, Paul Polman) who has called themselves, ‘The biggest NGO in the world’! And herein lies the reason behind such ‘charitable’ appellations, which claim they are better than nation-states. And it is such NGOs, or rather, the creation of such mammoth multinational corporations (MNCs) to avoid the taxes & exchange controls of nation-states, ably assisted accountants, that is the subject of one of this ee’s Focuses (Foci?), as ee continues looking into the creation & function of British American Tobacco (BAT), which controls the monopoly called the Ceylon Tobacco Co (CTC).

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‘There is more bloody nonsense talked on this subject than on any

other business topic… it has become the oh-so-fashionable subject…

there’s an avalanche of books & conferences on the subject, but little

common sense… we have to be better behaved than anyone else… we

are put upon in all sorts of outrageous ways… you can fall over

backwards to be a good citizen of the countries where you operate,

and then find yourself denounced as exploiters… something sinister

seems to have attached itself to the title ‘multinational corporation’; well,

whatever you call it governments have killed a hell of a lot more people

than companies… governments tend to make the world companies their scapegoats,

partly because they don’t realise the limitations of their own power.’

Richard P Dobson, Chairman British-American Tobacco (1970-76)

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Formed in London in 1902, BAT was set up to control the domestic ‘home’ markets of other countries, controlling trademarks & brands outside of England, Ireland, and the USA (excepting the socialist countries, of course). By the 1970s, BAT was operating 140 factories manufacturing tobacco products in 54 countries. The accusations of causing an epidemic of cancer, inflating state expenditures on health, was also the principal reason for their control over paper manufacture, printing & packaging but a policy of planned investment in industries not directly related to tobacco, food, pharma & life insurance etc.

     CTC was in the news this week, if not in name, at least in spirit, with the headline ‘Container declared as office furniture turns out to be Rs435bn worth of cigarettes.’ Cigarette companies have been known to smuggle cigarettes to avoid taxes, helping the formation of gangster networks known for their smuggling of other substances. While an Island editorial declared, ‘Political parties are the ground zero of corruption’, ee believes it is their multinational sponsors who are the real zeroes… Meanwhile, a seeming spokesman for the Ceylon Tobacco Co parading as ‘interested reader’ of ee (see Comments) insists that the company abides by the laws & regulations. So be sure they do, after helping to frame those ineffective legalities!

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• If England is criticizing Sri Lanka’s ‘human rights’, why don’t England’s principal representatives in Sri Lanka tell us and their rulers in London what they really think of us? ee is referring of course to the great English multinational banks & corporations, with budgets larger than Sri Lanka & most countries – such as Standard Chartered Bank, Hongkong & Shanghai Bank, Unilever, Ceylon Tobacco Co.  England is so concerned about truth & reconciliation it seems, here as in South Africa & Canada, for instance. Isn’t it time then, that Unilever tell the truth about its operations in Sri Lanka? Isn’t it time Unilever reconcile with the people of this country, from whom it has sucked out great profits? There’s an ’inescapable need to deal with the past’, says USAID’s National Peace Council spokesman, one Perera. If this is case, then these corporations such as Unilever surely must stand in front of the line, for it is in the enslaving plantations that we find Sri Lanka & Unilever’s history & truth, and not just here. After all, it became a literary industry & internet meme to blame Belgium’s King Leopold for the horrors that beset Africa’s great Congo, a horror that continues to this day, just across the ocean from us, as a US and Europe-backed Uganda & Rwanda invade the Congo. As well as the UAE & their US sponsors who are funding the war on Sudan. All just across the water from us, ready to set the world aflame. 

     Setting the world aflame to maintain & reassert their imperialist supremacy is also the principal reason behind the ‘tariffs’ announced by US President Don Trump, despite his clamorous claims that it is an attempt to reverse the de-industrialization of his country. And yet, ‘Within the IMF, the term ‘industrial policy’ is met with outright hostility’, according to the economists Bram & Howard Nicholas (see ee Economists, Following IMF policy recommendations will lead to yet another debt crisis).

     What is the role such multinational banks and corporations play in our exports that the USA claims is causing them such industrial pain? They certainly cause us pain and prevent local industry! And why doesn’t the so-called Asia Internet Coalition – AIC (representing the USA’s Meta, Google, X, Booking.com, Amazon, etc) pay taxes in Sri Lanka? Tell us, dear Donald, tell us! Is that why your tariffs included only the export of goods and not services. And we hear that your IMF prevented Sri Lanka’s Internal Revenue Department and the  Fiscal Policy Department from insisting on a digital service tax for all these companies. They told the government that it simply cannot be allowed to happen. Instead,  the government now has to impose a digital service VAT to be paid by the consumer. Imagine that! The IMF blocked a tax!

     ee Focus also continues with US Vice President JD Vance’s speech, where he calls for preventing the industrialization of countries such as ours. Vance is also known as a ‘Trump tweeter’, whose position is so far insecure (though a earlobe away from the presidency), who has to continually repeat Trump’s name to keep in his good books. Known as an ‘anti-China hawk’ beholden to his sponsors such as PayPal’s Peter Thiel who funded his political career, portraying this Yale graduate as a p’or lil white boy, the settler Vance’s anti-immigrant rhetoric is heightened by his marriage to a non-resident Indian (NRI)immigrant who apparently did not come cheap…

     Meanwhile, ee Focus also offers an intriguing excerpt of Manuka Wijesinghe’s more detailed implication of the US ambassador ‘extraordinaire’ Bernhard Gufler in the murder of PM SWRD Bandaranaike in 1959… ee already recalled Gufler’s involvement in ‘Exposing the Real Assassins of SWRD Bandaranaike, 12 October 2019. Wijesinghe, however, also places the murder in the context of the role played by Indonesia’s Muslim head of state, President Sukarno (also later deposed midst the US, Dutch & English stage-managed genocide of 1965) who had insisted that the Buddha’s ‘ahimsa’ should be the binding that held the Non-Aligned Movement founded in Bandung in 1955, together.

     ee Focus starts by reproducing the economist WA Wijewardena’s recall of the ‘Marxist’ Philip Gunawardena’s ‘Visionary Economic Policies in 1930s’ which offer a benchmark for what politicians can accomplish when truly truly truly dedicated to their country’s upliftment….

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Contents:

Truthifying & Reconciling in Sri Lanka Implicates England’s Unilever, CTC & CIC