Sri Lanka is one of the three countries that have been placed on the European Commission’s blacklist of countries at risk for acts of money-laundering. The other two countries are Tunisia and Trinidad and Tobago.
At a vote taken in the European Parliament to remove the three countries from the blacklist, 357 votes were received for the motion and 283 against it while 26 abstained from voting. However, the motion was not accepted as 376 votes are required to adopt a motion.
After Wednesday’s decision, Parliament may meet to discuss the EU money laundering blacklist again when the Financial Action Task Force (FATF) next updates its own money laundering/terrorism financing blacklist.
Parliament will continue using the FATF list methodology to decide which countries should be discussed for blacklisting until later this year, when it will start using its new methodology agreed with the European Commission (EC).
Archives for February 9, 2018
Here’s AG’s report that makes its readers shudder!
Auditor General Gamini Wijesinghe publishing the Annual Report of the Auditor General’s Department stated that the readers would be dismayed at the contents.
AG said that the debt management was in shambles given the deliberate and complete disregard for financial norms and regulations for over a decade. He said, “If anybody questions me of the total figure of the country’s debt as at present, my answer would be that only ‘Waima’ can sort it out. It is such a mess especially due to mismanagement in the last 10 years.” He said taking loans in a manner that exceeded the ceiling limit of borrowings and then hiding those figures from accounting books or transferring those figures to various other institutions had led to the crisis.
Mr Gamini Wijesinghe revealed a “dummy account” named “Investments on Borrowings” which had been used to balance the account sheets since 2013. He said the Finance Ministry has in writing admitted that it was really a dummy account and even recurrent expenditure came under this heading.
We would like to give the link to the report for the perusal of our interested viewers.