By Lucien Rajakarunanayake Courtesy The Island

Ring, ring…..

Hello…Are you coping well…this is Arjun…

C’mon…is it the Governor or the Perpetual?

What difference does it make…both of us want to know about COPE…can we have a good deal with COPE?

I don’t know about any deal…I’m trying to get one footnote…not only me…my other green players, too…it’s not so easy…looks like we will leave our footprints all over and have no footnotes…

That could be the type of talk that went on, in what must be a world record of phone calls on Treasury Bonds.

This is a real Ring-along episode, in the Treasury bond scam. More than a thousand phone calls, on landlines and cell phones, smartphones – on WhatsApp and Viber, and SMS too. It is a fast move to the world of digital technology in the crooked world of Bond Fixing.

Imagine the contacts that Members of Parliament of Green Politics had with the Perpetual dealer in Bond Scams – this not likely to be explained as one more example of Blue-Green politics moving on to Vision 2025. It is very much the reality of the Crooked Vision that has embraced the players in Green Politics, who came with loud promises to do away with the Dirty Politics of the Rajapaksas.

You can’t blame the Rajapaksas for laughing. Nothing done so far about all those millions that the country lost in their own crooked days; instead, we are learning every day about how the yahapalana torchbearers are setting fire to the security of the Central Bank and the Employees’ Provident Fund.

Have you heard of any Governor of a Central Bank of any country talks so much on the phone on the crucial days of Treasury bond auctions, to those who were directly handling the bond transactions? Could this be part of the Singapore culture that Arjun Mahendran brought here? Many of his calls were to Indika Saman Kumara – the EPF Dealer in the Central Bank. They must have brought rings of great joy to Saman Kumara, coming from the Governor himself. Let’s not talk about profit. That would be in bank accounts.

The Governor’s calls went to Saman Kumara’s partner too – Ms. Thakshila Kumari. What a generous Governor this must be, one with an unusually extended interest in the affairs of an EPF dealer and his unmarried partner. Is this the opening up of a new phone call culture in this country? Governors or Chairmen of banks being so ‘phonely’ and profitably linked with the unmarried partners of their dealers?

There is another phone rascal or villain we must not forget. None other than Ravi Karunanayake, former Minister of Finance and still a member of parliament, too. The one who is known as the ‘Forgetful Hero’ of Perpetual Treasuries. Just imagine the Bond Connections of this penthouse personality. He talks to Arjuna Aloysius, his Perpetual Rentmaster, with 84 calls during the crucial Bond period.

That is not all. Ravi Penthouse K and members of his family spoke to the Perpetual Aloysius over 700 times, from early February 2015 to mid-June 2017. Do you think he will remember any of these calls? Not likely. It is not the stuff he is known to remember, as he stated before the Bond Commission not so long ago. What do you think the other members of his family spoke about, possibly without ever telling him about it all? Could it be about the penthouse facilities? Or could it be about better accommodation, in even better days to come? After all, let’s not forget that he remains the most forgetful leader in UNP or Green Politics of today.

What we have found is the Phone-O-Rama of Treasury Bond Racketeering. It is the UNPs great contribution to what it so often refers to as the new Knowledge Economy. I would not know whether all these phone contacts were meant to increase phone bill payments to support the economy. There may have been a little thought about that, with the former Governor of the Central Bank and the former Finance Minister being so phone committed in these crucial times and matters.

Yet, the other truth is the huge phone call footprint the UNP MPs left, in what were their desperate to leave footnotes to shade their party leader, and his trusted Governor, in the COPE Report on the Bond Scams. The calls were not green, but purple with the politics of the crooked.