e-Con e-News

Posted byee ink.May 2, 2026Posted inUncategorizedTags:China, digitalization, economy, external-resources-department, finance, IMF, Ministry of Finance, news, politics

blog: https://eesrilanka.wordpress.com

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

e-Con e-News 26 April – 02 May 2026

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‘As President & Minister of Finance, were you aware that

on or around Sept 6, 2025, a cyberattack was launched against

the data system of the Ministry of Finance under your purview?’

– see ee Random Notes, The 22 Open Questions

of the Free Lawyers Organisation

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Has anybody noticed how the ever-present, sometimes hourly, and many-times-daily-smiling visage of the Central Bank governor, principal purveyor of the so-called independent Central Bank & its new US-Treasury-pushed Act, holding his palms & related fingers together in deep fiscal thought, or shaking them with some smiling foreign (usually white, or honorary white, Japanese or Indian), has gone AWOL off the front-pages?

     Sri Lanka having been locked into continuing the colonial import-export, labor-intensive and low-waged plantation economic swindle, we have now been lured eyes-wide-blinded into the leg- and brain-trap of so-called digitalization. Now several, not-so-private & very-public multimillion$ electronic frauds have come to be divulged, with accusations & recriminations involving IT (Information Technology) flying as fast and as thick as drones over the USA’s colonized bases.

     So, here are some interesting structural features to guardrail any discussion on an internet which originates in the USA military’s Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA):

• ‘3 Global North companies – SubCom, Alcatel Submarine Networks, Nippon Electric Co produce ‘87% of the undersea cables through which the internet operates’

• ‘3 US companies – AWS, Azure, Google Cloud – own 68% of the world’s cloud infrastructure.’ 

     It is perhaps, no wonder then, that the 68-page-long draft report by the 2024 Committee to Formulate an Artificial Intelligence Strategy (CFSAI) for SL had omitted the words ‘sovereign’ or ‘sovereignty’! Shiran Illanperuma & Vijay Prashad (I&P)’s essay on AI & Digital Sovereignty (see ee 1 Nov 2025) pointing to this omission, thus highlighted, ‘apart from China, the Global South does not have the capital or the technology to develop a sovereign, or even semi-sovereign, digital infrastructure’. I&P therefore call for the ‘Global South’ to develop a united technological response to this clear gap, and crying necessity. They also detail certain steps that have to be taken together by Asian & African & non-Anglo-American organizations to counter this almost monopoly power.

     I&P therefore query digitalization: ‘Who will own the data? Who will own the infrastructure? Who will regulate & govern? &, who has the technological capabilities to define the development of this technology? They also raised concerns ‘over the security of data as well as the neglect of local talent & capabilities,’ as well as asking ‘Should local firms be given priority when developing digital infrastructure? If they lack experience or expertise, how best can policy be shaped to address these deficiencies?’ And we asked this vital question, which I&P also ask: ‘Who will own the technology, how will it be used, & in whose interests? 

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Corruption! Corruption! One team in, another team out,

same game, same waste of time, of days & nights,

we don’t make a bat, we don’t make a ball, we don’t

make the lord’s rules, we don’t make wicket,

we only sell ticket, don’t make tv, only commentary –

Corruption! Corruption, one team in, another team out…

So, here is an intriguing timeline to the fraud & murder involving the country’s highest offices. It is most vital to emphasize that the real economic & bank fraud, which remains mostly unmeasured & unreported and therefore not sensationalized, is the prevention of investment in modern (machine-making-machine) industrialization. The sabotage of the almost-100-year-old Bank of Ceylon and then the almost 65-year-old People’s Bank, as well as the IMF & World Bank’s hijacking of the Central Bank and then the so-called development banks, NDB, DFCC, etc, has turned them into pure commercial banks. These are the real frauds, which these latest retail frauds only can serve to divert us, from delving deeper.

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In October 2025, it was reported that Sri Lanka’s Government Cloud (LGC) services were ‘disrupted’. There was no follow-up public investigation (as usual, though we do understand the need for national security) even as we were never told how & why the ‘disruption’ really occurred. LGC services also include ‘The Police Clearance System of the Department of Police’. Ha! So, the police were robbed too!

     The disruption took place midst the usual expensively lit & garish conferences, with much prize-giving & award-taking, and media headlines on how hip we are on the latest imported digital technologies and cybersecurity, and the crying need for more digitalization. The disruption also took place just before Sri Lanka’s Supreme Court dismissed 2 fundamental rights petitions filed by former Minister Wimal Weerawansa & others, to annul the Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) signed with India on a controversial digital identity card project, which was again brought up in the news this week (see ee Sovereignty, FSP’s Wasantha Mudalige questions e-NIC project over security & foreign ties).

     That October 2025 disruption took place midst much blather and clatter about Elon Musk’s rather intrusive Starlink being granted a license to operate internet services by the Telecommunications Regulatory Commission of SL (TRCSL). Even President AK Dissanayake lifted his eyes (as usual) up to the heavens, and raised ‘national security concerns that local authorities have no access to Starlink’s data system’. Of course, an import-crazed celebrity-fixated mass media had already helped to fabricate Musk as a brilliant individual entrepreneur, even as his rise is linked to military intelligence shadows in the USA (not to mention England & still white-dominated South Africa). ee also pointed to how Starlink ‘operates without authorization in countries such as Cuba & Venezuela’.

     At that time, ee asked why the US & EU governments seemed to be in ‘an awful hurry to digitally scan Sri Lanka. We also recall how, in this age of digitally-flattened Palestine & Iran, the US-funded economic thinktank Verité’s SL Economic Policy Group and board member Mick Moore was insisting at that time on mapping that ‘uniquely identify all properties using aerial imagery’. Moore’s pretext was the ‘weak’ collection of ‘Property Taxes in Sri Lanka’. We even asked why Moore, an ‘expert on tax evasion’, including by multinational corporations (MNCs), had not ‘mapped’ how England’s Unilever, or Ceylon Tobacco Co or ICI-CIC have kept evading their duties to Sri Lanka’s treasury for over 100 years. Moore is an anointed ‘Officer of the Most Excellent Order of the British Empire (OBE) for his services to international development’ (which we always point out is a Unilever-concocted euphemism to replace ‘colonialism’).

     The European Union (EU) was then also demanding the mapping of Sri Lanka because its new EU Deforestation Regulation (EUDR) ‘prohibits the import & export of goods produced from deforested land’ (tea plantations, anyone?!), with the EU funding the SL Ministry of Plantations’ ‘to survey & map all smallholder rubber lands across Sri Lanka’. So, the disruption took place midst a lot of such digital trafficking.

     The October 2025 cloud disruption here occurred midst the US administration issuing another travel warning to tourists visiting Sri Lanka, of an imminent threat of violence, terrorism, & landmines! Landmines, supposedly cleared just months earlier, with great fanfare & glorified naming of NGOs, were then suddenly uncovered in Jaffna (as ee noted, 18 Oct 2025). Many of the cloud services being provided in Sri Lanka are linked to US & their subordinate colonized pitbulls like England & Israel, etc.

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The Ministry of Finance (MoF)’s External Resources Department (ERD) sits pretty at the centre of ongoing ‘debt’ fraud. World Bank Hijacks Ministry of Finance was the title of ee 20 August 2022. This examined the role of the US-controlled World Bank, IMF & other International Financial Institutions (IFIs) in compromising the independence of the most important institutions in the country – in particular, the MoF’s External Resources Department. ERD is supposed to ‘conduct loan negotiations with development partners & lending agencies’ and also ‘manage government external debt’. ERD is also the lead agency in the ongoing IMF ‘discussions’, along with the MoF’s Fiscal Policy Department. ee noted: the ERD ‘coordinates’ development partners, and is therefore eminently susceptible to the seductive wiles of ‘development agencies’. There’s a lot of revolving doors between ERD and such IFIs as the IMF & WB. Most of the ERD officers have gone to Washington DC to either work or study. This is a form of bribery that these IFIs excel in. MoF officers also expect the IMF will provide them ‘degrees’ for their upward mobility – a means of promotions in the MoF or CBSL, by pandering to the whites to get into US PhD programs.

     The ERD also negotiates credit lines to enable the Sri Lanka Government to buy essentials, such as fuel, food, medicines. Critics have roundly blamed the ERD for not just the failure to direct investment into the modern production of such fuel, food & medicines, to enable their local substitution, but also for damaging trade relations with China, Russia & Iran – links that could have prevented the US choking off such crucial supply lines in 2022, as well as now.

     The ERD’s official website describes their ‘Mission‘: ‘To source global knowledge, experience, expertise, and foreign resources as required for the socioeconomic development in Sri Lanka at appropriate terms, and also arrange domestic currency financing for working capital & the development requirements of the country.’

     Yet the ERD’s ‘Functions’ undermine its mandate ‘to source global knowledge’ by having to ‘report ‘relevant debt data to World Bank on quarterly basis and annual basis’. Of the ERD’s main ‘Functions’, listed first on its website: ‘Conduct consultations with development partners and funding agencies to identify development assistance strategies & priorities.’ What has the ERD & the WB identified as priorities?

     The earliest criticism of the Gotabaya Rajapakse government’s economic policies was a leaked May 2020 ‘Cabinet memorandum’ based on a report ‘prepared by the Finance Ministry’s External Resources Department (according to authoritative sources)’, Gotabaya Govt got early warnings about economic crisis, headlined the Sunday Times on 17 July 2022, after the President abdicated.

     We also noted how the ERD was behind the selective release of data that blamed China for the country’s economic turbulence. A 12 June 2022, Sunday Times reported, Sri Lanka’s Ambassador in China, Palitha Kohona as stating: ‘China could consider supplying diesel & fertiliser if a formal request was made through the External Resources Department of SL’.  On 26 June 2022, the ERD was praised by the Sunday Times as being a repository of ‘committed senior public servants’, along with the CB’s Public Debt Office.

     The ERD website’s ‘History of the External Resources Department‘ narrates a seamless continuity from English invasion to the present, untrammelled by the need to explain any such seemingly trivial matter as ‘independence‘:

‘The Treasury was established in 1806 AD as a sub-institution

under the Controller of Revenue. It was upgraded to a major

institution in 1834. The Treasury was brought under the

Ministry of Finance in 1948. During this era, the functions of

the Treasury were carried out by several divisions…

The External Resources Division was responsible

for organization & channeling of external resources.

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• The continuing US & European wars on Iran & Russia, and the US blockade of of the Strait of Hormuz, have differently impacted countries & their economies. The white wars on China have never ended. Their invasions of Korea, Taiwan & occupation of Pacific countries are referred to as ‘frozen wars’.

     Socialist China’s long-term and open accumulation of ‘substantial strategic oil reserves’, as well as their active innovation & development of alternative sources of energy, is intricately examined by Warwick Powell (see ee Focus). Readers should be warned, Powell can be rather exacting, and yet, the times require such deeper seeking…

China launched strategic initiatives several decades ago, and he places China’s need for West Asian oil in its proper perspective & mix. Powell recalls former Chinese President (2002-12) Hu Jintao’s famous decades-old observation about the ‘Malacca Dilemma’. China however has developed numerous alternatives, not just due to the ‘China psychosis’, an updated version of the ‘yellow peril’ that lives ‘rent-free’ in white supremacists’ brains. He details the various tactics used by China’s critics complaining of overinvestment & overproduction, noting if not for such needed funding and production China would now be at their mercy. However, the USA’s so-called ‘grand strategy’ seeks to contain not just China, by blockading much of Asia’s access to the energy resources of West Asia & elsewhere (the Americas, etc). The USA has long been targeting numerous chokepoints around the world, and not just Sri Lanka, while also attempting to activate their colonial poodles & pitbulls, promoting divide&rule tactics. The US blockade is however ‘porous’, Powell argues, with tankers adopting assorted tactics to slip through…

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• A perfect storm is approaching Sri Lanka, with the country suffering a ‘4^th West Asian Oil Crisis’, records Shiran Illanperuma, as he seeks to find answers to the current dilemmas in the ruminations of GVS de Silva’s classic, Heretical Thoughts (see ee Focus). Illanperuma provides updated examples of what GVS – renowned architect of the Paddy Lands Act & Ceylon Petroleum Corporation (CPC) discussed almost 60 years ago. The media is resorting to their usual infantile wailing & gnashing of teeth, enumerating all the imports (remittances, tourists, oil, fertilizer, food, pharma, cars) and exports (tea, rags, trinkets, etc) we will now lack, acting coy as if this was not to be expected, and praying that the USA will soon return to its normal benevolent self (if there was ever such a phenom).

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‘Many of SL’s problems, such as limited export diversification

& insufficient foreign direct investment, have been present time &

again, & are not caused by the current middle east crisis.’

– Ravinatha Aryasinha (see ee Economists, Middle East crisis,

a wakeup call for structural reforms)

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‘We conclude with the expectation of an early end

to the current hostilities between Iran & the US-Israeli

alliance, and there will be peace soon.’

– Nimal Sanderatne (see ee Economists,

Economic performance in 1^st year of

JVP/NPP government & prospects this year)

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The media’s commentators monotonously keep shilling their first-aid solutions like ‘diversification’ and more ‘foreign investment’, yet never stating ‘investment for what’? and ‘what kind of diversification’? They dare not mention the words ‘modern industrial production’. Illanperuma discusses GVS’ take on ‘import substitution’ & his call for a less capital-intensive model of development, as well as for rural industrialization. Illanperuma is mistaken though, when he says Heresies was written at the time of the 1^st oil shock in 1973. It was published (March 1973) just before the OPEC resolution (Oct 1973), though the threat of artificial scarcities of food etc, was becoming more apparent, again linked to the US (Israeli Yom Kippur) wars. More importantly, Illanperuma points to GVS’ heresy as based on his opposition to the mistaken thesis for ‘Sir’ WA Lewis, knighted & Nobel-prized, who promoted an urban-based development model.

     Illanperuma, however, feels GVS was far too optimistic about our ability to learn from those bitter lessons of yesteryear. He concludes: ‘Deepening crisis need not lead to clarity; it could just as easily lead to further confusion’. Indeed there is no guarantee of enlightenment, only a more rigorous insight as to what a renaissance truly entails. He does not mention that GVS’ next collection published in 1988 was titled, The Alternatives, Socialism or Barbarism (curiously republished by an immiserated SSA with the vapid funder-friendly title Poverty & People’s Power). Though barbarism it has been so far, for indeed the post’77 dispensations with its resorts to destroying all the remnant advances made by a nascent though naif industrial policy, led to further internecine warfare within the country, and now… here we are… and here we go… hopefully not again to further annihilations…

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• This ee Focus therefore also concludes our reproduction of Ginige Vernon Stanley de Silva’s classic, Some Heretical Thoughts on Economic Development. GVS exposed the simple, commodity production economy, to which the countryside is restricted. He pointed out how every country has to face this limitation, with some doing away with it, some still grappling with it and others not even aware of it. He described how capitalism brutally destroyed small farming, and how socialism has tried to do it differently. We here need to challenge the perhaps mechanical application of the term ‘feudal’ to describe all of Sri Lanka’s past. Feudal in Marxist terms refers to a pre or proto capitalist phases which contains within it the seeds of a modern industrial (machine-making machine) capitalism.

     GVS however offered an intermediary program based on our rural needs & resources. He stated that rural economy has to be ‘freed from the rapacious grip of the urban middleman, transporter & moneylender, and the rural-urban terms of trade reversed in its favour’. He observed, ‘the petty owner is a hopeless credit risk, according to the canons of commercial banking’.

The successful redirection of material resources

& human skills in the form of engineers, research

scientists, doctors, technicians, skilled workers,

managers, accountants, economists & sociologists,

from the urban to the rural economy…

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He then surveyed the forms of organization that rural revitalization would require to overcome atomization, the rich international experience which requires adaptation to local realities, and producer cooperatives. Changing the world, changing the country, requires first changing the village. ‘The Community Organization must plan, organize & direct the entire economy.’ He described rural unemployment as the main challenge. Writing in the wake of the 1^st JVP insurrection, he bestowed hope in the educated & unemployed youth, and called for urban resources & people to use their energies to first revitalize the countryside…

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A certain psychological mechanism was needed

to justify the jettisoning of the ancient idea

of the fundamental equality of human beings

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• This ee Focus reproduces some of the most fascinating of SBD de Silva’s insights into the workings of the wasteful import-export plantation system. These excerpts, from Chapter 9 of his 1982 classic The Political Economy of Underdevelopment,point out that the outrages of this system – superexploitation and oppression of Sri Lankan workers ‘was not exclusively an economic phenomenon’ but was connected to ‘the political domination of the coloured races by European colonizers’:

‘The commercialization of slavery in 18^th century racism

assumed a new form, which was later to become widespread

as the European nations extended their dominion abroad.’

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Most interestingly, SBD said it was a more vicious update of an ideology of ‘compulsion & propaganda’ which was used to create a factory labor force in Europe & the USA. He surveyed & differentiated the various types of ‘slavery’ that existed in Africa & Asia. He also charted the shifting of attitudes in Europe towards Africans & Asians, and how ‘the supporting ideology of cheapened labour’ came to be ‘linked with the organization of the world economy on colour lines’.

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• This ee Focus also examines the US government’s attempt to capture the Atlantic & Pacific hemisphere through the lens of its greatest industries. The US colonization of Canada, Mexico, occupied Japan, Korea & Germany become apparent through their roles in reducing worker power in the auto industry. The US capitalist class has shifted the centre of that ‘greater industrial archipelago of metal-bending communities’ in the Great Lakes from the USA’s Detroit and Canada’s Windsor in the 1980s, to the hinterlands of the Gulf of Mexico, where Mexican workers receive 10%of what Anglo North American workers get, offering the USA’s GM, Ford & Stellantis a way to respond to Asian competition. The USA dominated research & development, the making of engines, transmissions & stampings, and Mexico got lower-value manufacturing, with Canada becoming a middle-technology sector.

     With the monopoly media blaming unions, these government forced unions to accept concessions, and focus on wages rather than working conditions (work rules, pace of work, control over staffing & production), which reduced their appeal to workers. The USA then began to automate, outsourcing, importing and shifting to anti-union jurisdictions in the US south, sacrificing skill & innovation. The Detroit 3 – GM, Ford, & Chrysler – dominated Ontario’s unionized assembly plants, before the 2008 global financial crisis. Now Japan’s Toyota and Honda now seemingly rule, with workers prevented from organizing unions, because these industries always depended on state subsidies. Canada is now attempting a transition to electric vehicles (EVs), which comes midst the USA’s desperate attempts to sabotage China’s clear primacy in renewable energy sectors & innovations.

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• This week saw large celebrations of May Day (see ee Random Notes about May Day’s origins) despite the attacks on the nationalist & workers’ movements by the ruling merchant & moneylender class. In Sri Lanka, ee has kept documenting the prevention of industrialization, the promotion of atomization, and hence the prevention of the consolidation of a workers’ movement into a working class.

     The USA & Europe’s sabotage of access to fuel and hence energy & electrical power, offers the best proof that their aim is to not just to prevent the industrialization of our countries but also the advance of socialism & communism.

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• Watch how our great media mavens, and ineffectual intellectuals, constantly & passively refer to an ‘Iran War’, or ‘Middle East Conflict’, or Hormuz Blockade, or even ‘Trump’s War’ or ‘US-Israeli War’. It is as if their inability to name it properly: as another US War or US Military Blockade, are blinders brought on by proximity to the fleshpots of Kolluptiya Junction! Yet, it is also more than the current US Regime. It may be easier to blame a psychotic Trump, or conniving Jews, or crafty Muslims or swarthy Arabs, than calling out the Big Banks & Weapons Manufacturers. Or name the Rockefeller oligarchy’s Exxon Corporation. It is the same with economics. Modern production, or industrial capitalism, is not handicraft, manufacture or assembly or services. Some call a poor man with money in their pocket, a rich man. Yet many capitalists don’t even carry money on them; Money is not capital unless it is used to produce things, that produce other things, & on & on…

     We have to get the words right, get the names right, and the addresses; also get the verbs & tenses right, yet it is not just a matter of language, it is a matter of knowing who our friends & enemies are, and most importantly knowing who we are, and yes, what exactly needs to be done…

     Sri Lanka is a country that has been under constant invasion (& siege in different ways) for 100s if not a 1,000 years, yet midst the old destruction, we still built great irrigation systems and monuments. More recently, the USA, the English, the Dutch & Portuguese, unable to carry off the monuments & tanks as well, and store them in their museums, have tried to destroy even those, as well as destroy our minds. So we have most often sought to simply survive and also endure… but we should still get the words right and know & do what is still to be done. 

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Fraud, Murder, IMF & the Ministry of Finance’s External Resources Department