Courtesy The Daily Mirror

President Maithripala Sirisena said a person larger than Arjuna Mahendran will stand in the bond scam witness box in the coming days with the legal documents to bring back the prime suspect of the Central Bank bomb scam had been completed.

He said a certain politician said in Kuliyapitiya that the UNP made a blunder in 2015 by choosing a wrong man as the common presidential candidate but this time it would not do that mistake again and if the UNP did that blunder again the people would make them walk on the street naked.

I like to tell that man that if I did not save the country from foreign influence, the selling of national assets to foreigners and destroying the country’s dignity by sacking the Prime Minister and replacing him with Mahinda Rajapaksa, this particular man would have not had even his loin cloth,” the President said.

Addressing the SLFP’s 68th annual convention at the Sugathadasa indoor stadium, the President said Prime Minister Ranil Wickremesinghe must take the full responsibility for repeatedly postponing provincial council elections.

According to what the Supreme Court has told me it is the delay in submitting the report by the three-member review committee led by the Prime Minister is the main obstacle to conducting the PC polls. Right now, no one knows when the PC polls could be held,” he said.

The President said the elite class-led governance had destroyed the country economically, spiritually and financially.

He said neo-liberal policies had a cancerous effect on each and every sector of the country and asked the people to be vigilant and put an end to these policies and politicians if the country was to rise up and progress.

Parliamentarians are corrupt, provincial councillors are corrupt, pradeshiya sabha members are corrupt. It is extremely difficult to get the approval for a building plan without paying millions of rupees as gratification to officials and politicians. The few in the elite political class has done much harm to the country. The need of the hour is to elect humane, patriotic, educated gentlemen to political office in place of corrupt, selfish and arrogant politicians,” the President said. (Sandun Jayasekera)