By Walter Jayawardhana

Sri Lanka granted a special investment zone exclusively for Chinese companies to bring much needed foreign investments into the country, a state owned television service in Colombo announced.

Investment Promotions Minister Anura Priyadarshana Yapa who said , “This is the first time Sri Lanka has granted a foreign country an exclusive area to attract investments.”

Sri Lanka’s Board of Investment (BOI) officials joined with the Ministerat a ceremony to ink the initial agreements with Huchen Investment Holdings Limited officials who would bring investments for a period of 33 years into the zone demarcated for the Chinese at Mirigama about 55 kilometers North from the capital Colombo.

Yapa said, over the next three years , Huichen will invest US $ 28 million to develop roads, power and sewerage facilities for the zone to prepare it for the companies to put up their structures.

Thirty Chinese companies involved in IT-related services have shown interest in the investments in the Mirigama Zone , said Huichen’s President Huang Yupin.

The Sri Lankan Investment Promotions Minister said, “With the war over , we have seen a lot of interest from companies to invest in areas like power, telecom, tourism, agro-processing, fisheries , education and IT services.”

With the end of a war which ran almost a quarter of a century , Minister Yapa said, the government of Sri Lanka has a target of attracting one billion US Dollars as investment this year as foreign investments.