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Standard Chartered Withdraws from Retail Banking in Sri Lanka as US & England Escalate Covert Terror in South Asia e-Con e-News 09-15 November 2025

Chosen as Miss Universe Sri Lanka 2024, and honoured for the ‘Best Catwalk’, Melloney Dassanayaka, a Standard Chartered Bank (SCBSL) employee, was then selected to represent Sri Lanka at the Miss Universe 2024 pageant in Mexico. An ‘active’ participant in SCBSL’s ‘various extracurricular activities’, she was also a member of the bank’s ‘Diversity & Inclusive Council’ and ‘Women’s Association’. We wonder about how ‘included’ Dassanayaka now feels in the London bank’s decision this week to sell off its ‘wealth & retail banking business’ in Sri Lanka to DFCC Bank. Did she appreciatively purr, ‘Meow!’

‘One of the worst things ever done was the privatization of the development banks – NDB (National Development Bank) & the DFCC (Development Finance Corporation of Ceylon) … I was actually involved in this whole discussion about the NDB & DFCC being privatized, and at the time the IMF representative – it’s many years now so I can say this openly – he told me, It’s a war of ideas, Howard, we need the privatization of development banks. We cannot allow any more East Asian success stories…’– Economist Howard Nicolas (ee 16 May 2020)

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On January 6, 2020, the then-new Central Bank Governor WD Lakshman said Sri Lanka needs a development bank. Well, we know what was done to him. He has now been silenced (no autobiographies are forthcoming) while the newest ‘independent’ CBSL governor cannot keep from frothing about what a great job he is doing, lying prone under the heavy breathing of the US Treasury.

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Miss Universe contests have been getting bad press lately, so we will not ask that queen of the catwalk about their treatment of women. However, SCB employees in Sri Lanka have known, since March this year at least, that SCB was going to sell off their more troublesome segments (see ee Quotes, Bankers’ Repo Rip-offs). A few days before their announcement, SCBSL hosted their prestigious annual awards ceremony, themed Hall of Fame: Celebrating Excellence, at the Shangri-La Hotel, Colombo, on 22 March 2025, where SCB declared their ‘unwavering commitment to empowering its employees through recognition and appreciation of their hard work and dedication’.

 A few days later, SCB announced they would be looking for a buyer to whom it could ‘divest its wealth & retail business in Sri Lanka, which includes priority banking, credit cards, retail lending, deposits and Small & Medium Enterprise (SME) portfolios. SCB assured their priority clients customers, they would continue to serve them as usual… Your deposits & monies remain safe.’ Priorities to whom? We don’t have to guess. Boru Shoke indeed! They declared, We have a rich legacy in Sri Lanka spanning over 130 years, and we remain committed to a strong presence in the country through our Corporate & Institutional Banking (CIB). They promised SCBSL’s wealth & retail banking employees would be ‘provided comparable roles and opportunities to continue to grow and further their careers with the new buyer’. SCB said the bank will look after their ditched clientele, during the transition period, which was expected to take 15-18 months. The deal is expected to close by March next year.

  Well, efficient as they are, they seem to have wrapped things up in 6 months, with the ‘deal to be completed by early 2026,’ pending approval from the Central Bank of Sri Lanka. The deal follows the global trend of banks exiting retail banking in emerging markets. ‘Emerging’ markets, like ‘developing’ countries, are countries which never emerge or develop!

  On 24 September, HSBC (HongKong & Shanghai Banking Corporation) announced they would sell their Sri Lankan retail banking business to Nations Trust Bank (NTB) for Rs18billion. We then compared these moves to the role the English banks gave to certain ‘minorities’ – Chettiar, Afghan (Baluchi), etc – to perform as buffers to lend to local, mainly Sinhala, borrowers (see ee 27 Sept 2025, HSBC Withdraws). The comparison remains true for SCB & DFCC. SCB says they are instead going to ‘focus more on corporate and institutional clients’. In April SCB’s parent company in London said they were committed ‘to concentrating resources where the group has the most distinctive client proposition’. We wonder what such euphemisms are supposed to mean: they have been big promoters of Sri Lanka’s import-export frauds, enabling such clients to launder their dollars and pounds into ‘safe havens’.

     In September of 2020, the CIA-linked International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ) dropped a ‘bombshell investigative report on money laundering by international banks.’ The ICIJ investigation was based on secret documents ‘leaked’ by the Financial Crimes Enforcement Network (FinCEN), a unit of the US Treasury. The documents showed that 5 multinational banks – JPMorgan, HSBC, Standard Chartered Bank, Deutsche Bank, & Bank of New York Mellon – kept profiting from ‘powerful & dangerous players’ even after US authorities fined these financial institutions for earlier failures to stem flows of dirty money. Dangerous? One of the complaints by multinational banks about retail banking in Asia & Africa have been increased surveillance of their activities related to money laundering, etc. So, they now wish others to take ‘the fall’.

     England, with its ‘significant economic footprint’ in the country, claims to be Sri Lanka’s ‘2nd-largest export destination’, which includes profiting off the extraction of mostly raw materials and the flooding the country with consumer goods. Over 100 England-related companies make huge profits here, including HSBC, Standard Chartered, Unilever, Ceylon Tobacco, ICI-CIC, M&S, London Stock Exchange Group, De La Rue Currency, Tesco, and Next (which was in the news recently for ditching their ‘garment’ workers: there’s been little coverage of these workers’ terms & conditions since).

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Staff are reviewing the published budget documents

to evaluate whether the 2026 budget is in line with the

program parameters. – Julie Kozack, IMF Communications

Director, to reporters in Washington (see ee Economists, IMF)

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     SCB – despite loud & regular virtue-signalling, like other multinationals claiming to be for ‘gender equality’ & a ‘best place to work’ – has a mass graveyard of many-gendered skeletons buried in its vaults. SCB’s origins may be traced to England’s chattel slave trade and mining in Africa, and their Indian-grown opium trade to China. But we need not go back that far.

     In November 2024, a former SCB worker, writing a letter to the editor in a prominent daily newspaper under the pseudonym ‘Geriatric Non-Pensioner’, demanded: How about getting Standard Chartered to pay the Monthly Pension to all those employees who were sent home on forced retirement 25 years ago? First time in Sri Lanka’s history, employment of Pensionable Permanent Employees at Standard Chartered Colombo were terminated, whereas there was a Trust called the Standard Chartered Colombo Local Employees Pension Trust Fund.’ Stealing pensions, huh?

     This week’s sale, which will cost DFCC Rs3.7billion, will be ‘funded entirely through internally generated capital’, says DFCC. DFCC Bank (Development Finance Corporation of Ceylon Act No 35 of 1955) and the National Development Bank (NDB) were started over 70 years ago as development banks, but their industrial functions were neutered under pressure from the IMF. This week, DFCC said: the sale was part of its strategic growth agenda to strengthen its retail and & management franchise. Is this ‘development’? They should rename themselves IFCC – Import Finance…

     It was less than 2 weeks prior to announcing the selloff that the SCBSL hosted a visiting ‘Jerry Zhang, Global Co-Head of Financial Institutions (FI) Coverage, and Regional Head of Financial Intuitions [sic!] Prashant Shah’, who promised to ‘strengthen Standard Chartered’s presence in this important market. They met CEOs of leading financial institutions and senior government officials, including Central Bank Governor Nandalal Weerasinghe’. A few days later, on March 11, SCB expressed optimism about Sri Lanka’s economic outlook, highlighting ‘renewed confidence among portfolio investors’. So much for ‘confidence’. They then announced their intention to sell off retail… In May this year SCB even announced ‘their strong commitment to driving financial innovation in Sri Lanka. Perhaps these commercial shenanigans are what they mean by ‘financial innovation’.

     The US Fitch Ratings Agency, which operates as another policing division in the country along with other ‘monitors’, had hinted that trouble was brewing: SCBSL’s small size, only about 0.1% of SCB’s total assets, implied that support, if needed, ‘would not be a burden to the head office’. Support for what?

     Earlier SCBSL’s native chieftain declared that the country’s ‘big-ticket foreign direct investments (FDIs) remain weak with private-sector deals averaging around $20million – well below the half a billion dollar transactions required to make a meaningful economic impact’.

     Along with other multinational corporations (MNCs), their economists decry supposed ‘populism’ (that has somehow ensured the continued colonial domination of the country by an import-export plantation economy) and keep demanding ‘policy stability’ complaining that Sri Lanka has historically altered key policies such as investment laws, land regulations and tax structures – every few years as Governments changed, deterring long-term investors. Investment in what?

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‘For the first time since 1977, Sri Lanka has

a government that believes in a manufacturing base.

– Deputy Industry Minister Chathuranga Abeysinghe

(see ee Economists, National Cleaner Production Centre

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• The last ee concluded Chapter 3 of SBD de Silva’s classic The Political Economy of Underdevelopment, where he dispensed with such fallacies as Sri Lanka having too small a market to industrialize. He showed how the principal difference between the wealthy settler-colonial countries and the impoverished non-settler countries was the domicile of the investors. Resident inside the country, they invested long-term in the local and regional home market and at first vigorously protected their nascent industries.

     This ee Focus begins Chapter 4, examining concrete examples of the differences between adjacent countries in Southern Africa. He shows how settlers were ‘generally inwardly oriented’, producing for the local market, displacing imports; how dividends were not transferred out but reinvested, and were then spread into ‘different lines’. The settlers detached from the metropolitan economy & society whiletransforming ‘social relations and production technology’, producing ‘a high proportion of intermediate & capital goods, with imports ‘mainly of raw materials & equipment’ to advance production and not consumption. Even midst war, they doubled their industrial workforces. Their iron & steel industry was changed from imported scrap iron to local ore. What mattered more was the ‘pattern of investment’. Cultivation was maintained ‘on a small scale’. The capacity to finance their expenditures on modern production was partly due to the retention of export proceeds within the country. Meanwhile, the interests of expatriates in non-settler colonies like Sri Lanka, were transitory, narrow & inflexible; with their investments owned & controlled abroad. The ‘dominant economic activity’ was narrow and wholly extractive…

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So how did Kerala, with both arms tied behind its back,

rid itself of poverty? The answer is the only weapon

that the powerless have at their disposal: organisation

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• Indices that truly measure the state of the economy are almost made non-existent – instead we are engulfed by fake measures such as GDP (Gross Domestic Product), PCI (Per-Capita Index), CPI (Consumer Price Index), etc.  Confronted with such estimates as PCI, the great scientist DD Kosambi once quipped, ‘It is the rare Indian who eats the grain assigned to him by the statistical averages.’ In this ee Focus, Shiran Illanperuma confronts the ‘rattle’ of feel-good numbers thrown at us after the budget, largely to please their white masters in Washington, who stand guard over the still colonial economy. He illustrates with the white guard’s (World Bank’s) own doctored numbers of the existence of the ‘extreme’ impoverishment around us (we abhor the Elizabethan construct of ‘poor’ which was a Frenchified derivative from the Latin pauper, to whitewash the horror of throwing the English peasantry off their ‘commons’ by ‘enclosure’). Illanperuma notes Sri Lanka’s earlier high ranking among the socialist giants, for social advances (health, literacy, etc) and the recent declaration by Kerala, the first Indian province to pull free of such a curse as ‘extreme poverty’. Despite being sabotaged by their own central government in Delhi, he details the steps taken by Kerala’s communist leaders – organizing social change: land reform, public health & education, and women’s empowerment. He examines why a purported party, parading as Marxist-Leninist, has been unable to challenge the disgusting rule of merchants & moneylenders, right here.

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During the White Encirclement of 1919,

the US deployed troops to Russia, alongside

English, French & Japanese forces, fighting the

Red Army directly, with over 500 US casualties.

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From 1931-41, as Japan carved up China,

Western banks maintained their offices in Tokyo,

Western oil fuelled Japanese warships, &

Western scrap metal became Japanese bullets

(US provided 90% of Japan’s scrap metal until 1940.

US metal became Zero fighters, battleships & bullets.

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‘I hate Indians. They are a beastly people with a beastly religion’

– Winston Churchill

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US priorities were clear: better a fascist Europe than

a socialist one. Better Japanese domination of Asia

than Chinese liberation & the expansion of socialism.

• The whites divided the world into3: democracy, communism, and fascism. It turns out that the world in fact has long been divided into 2 – Communism vs Fascism. Roy Singham in a powerful, line by line, footnote by footnote, exegesis, dismantles & takes down the myths bellowed & blasted into our skulls by Hollywood, BBC, Reuters, carefully tearing away the masks of such cardboard heroes as England’s Churchill and the USA’s Roosevelt etc, to expose their true & horrific role in those wars called worldly, such as WW2, which began not in 1939 as many a tinselled Hollywood flick has saturated us with, but in 1931, with Japan’s invasion of China. (see ee Focus)

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• ee Focus also continues Gustavus Myers’ History of Tammany Hall, which details the relationship between corporations and the buying of legislators, to promote friendly legislation and kill laws hostile to private corporate control of national resources. This excerpt examines the graft practised by insurance and other companies. He here exposes the importance of sacrificing certain colleagues to proclaim reform, – an ostentatious sop to public opinion – and the ‘secret of colonizing voters & carrying elections’ , including the buying & installing of opponents. This required funds to be collected from mining, realty & transportation companies, so as to retain lawyers. It needed the learning of the arts of knowing ‘the ways of legislators’ & how to ‘approach them properly’.  Such arts also included the installation of friends in offices that regulated industry, finance and trade,as well as controlling judges in the courts.

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‘The recent explosion in Delhi, reportedly linked [by India]

to the Pakistan-based militant outfit Jaish-e-Muhammad (JeM),

the decision of the Sri Lankan cricket team to cut short its tour

citing security concerns, & the travel advisories issued by England

& the US all reveal how quickly the regional temperature is rising.’

– ee Security, The Shifting Landscape of Global Extremism

• Silences about silences, is how Island correspondent Shamindra Ferdinando describes the eerie quietude by almost all political formations surrounding some of India’s demands on Sri Lanka, to prevent questions about fishing invasions or fathering the LTTE. But it is not just about India’s role in funding & training terror and causing injury to the economy in Sri Lanka, it is also about the resounding silence about what right England (& Holland & Portugal) have to lecture us about human rights, when they have failed to repair the 500 years of damage, instead further hobbling us to enable the ongoing colonization of Sri Lanka by their North Atlantic master, the white-settler colony now known as the USA.

     These resounding silences have much to do with the shared secrets that make for honor among thieves. While parties continue to trade insults & accusations on who was responsible for the April 2019 terrorism that shook the country, the US President this week sought to enlighten us yet again by inviting to the White House on November 10, former Al Qaeda & ISIS leaders who have helped them destabilize Syria. This week saw terrorist attacks on the capitals of 2 of the most populous countries in the region, both of which wield nuclear weapons, just as the US (with their satrapies in West Asia, including the UAE & Israel) escalate war on the Sudan, while moving military forces into the Caribbean Sea and encouraging terrorist subversion. They are also kindling wars in Southeast Asia, as between Thailand and Cambodia, and in Myanmar. The USA & England’s recent travel & investment advisories about Sri Lanka are all aimed at exacting further economic & military concessions, while whining & whingeing about how corrupt or difficult we are…even as they bomb us – this is the ruling sound of their music. The bombings in India & Pakistan, do not have to be by ‘opposing’ nations. They have agents in all our countries, of all types. Russian President V Putin is due to visit India on 6 December. Their aim is to prevent the ongoing attempts to unify countries that have suffered for too long under imperialist rule…So, what about our aim??

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Amnesty for All – ‘With such a history, the government should

seriously explore all possibilities of Restorative Justice, starting with

a blanket Amnesty for all associated with the Insurrections

& Armed Conflict and extending it beyond to restore the livelihood

& the wellbeing of the survivors in all communities’

– Neville Ladduwahetty, (see, ee Sovereignty,

The scope of Sri Lanka’s commitments to accountability0

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Contents:

Standard Chartered Bank Withdraws from Retail Banking in Sri Lanka as US & England Escalate Covert Terror in South Asia