e-Con e-News

e-Con e-News 19-25 April 2026

blog: https://eesrilanka.wordpress.com

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

e-Con e-News 19-25 April 2026

Shocking revelations – about the USA inveigling Indian & Sri Lankan officials to comply with their murder of over 100 naval cadets – have been made by the Iranian captain of the ship IRIS Dena. The captain last week appeared live on Iranian TV, revealing the dirty details of the ambush by the USA in Sri Lanka’s Exclusive Economic Zone. The USA had been made aware that the Dena was unarmed – a condition that India had insisted upon and verified when the Iranian ships invited by India had first entered that country’s waters for friendly international exercises. The USA had first scuttled the propeller, and then deliberately fired a 2^nd torpedo at the cadets – who had assembled in full view on deck to surrender, as demanded by international protocols. The captain’s revelations (see ee Random Notes) suggest that the USA had got India to delay providing shelter to the ships after the US war broke out, forcing them to take a longer route to safety. They also got Sri Lankan officials to comply with that dastardly deed, despite SL officials also inviting the ships to visit Sri Lanka.

     US Pacific Fleet Commander Admiral Steve ‘Webby’ Koehler visited Sri Lanka from February 19-21, visiting New Delhi. This was less than 10 days before the outbreak of war. In Colombo, Koehler generously announced the departure from the US of a 4^th Coast Guard vessel ‘donated’ to Sri Lanka. Koehler also met SL Navy Commander Kanchana Banagoda (who had extended, when in India for the exercises, an invitation for the Iranian ships to vist Sri lanka), Deputy Defence Minister Maj Gen. (retd) Aruna Jayasekera and Defence Secretary Air Vice Marshal (retd) Sampath Thuyakontha. Koehler also visited the Indian-military-suborned Colombo Dockyard ‘to explore maritime collaboration’. Koehler had first visited Sri Lanka in October 2024, shortly after AK Dissanayake was elected President, and met with the President & other officials ‘to consolidate US military ties with Sri Lanka’. Between Koehler’s visits, the USA & Sri Lanka formalized the defence partnership between the Montana National Guard, the US Coast Guard District 13, and the Sri Lanka Armed Forces under the US Department of War’s State Partnership Program (SPP). The JVP-led NPP government then delayed their decision on a one-year moratorium on all foreign research vessels entering Sri Lankan waters, designed to block Chinese vessels despite allowing other country’s warships to enter. The ban had long lapsed on December 31, 2024.

     Koehler’s 2^nd visit coincided with meetings between the Montana SPP & Sri Lanka’s Ambassador to Washington, Mahinda Samarasinghe, which promised ‘significant investment’ in Sri Lanka’s graphite sector. The Montana delegation included Lt Colonel Chris Cory & James Mooney, founder of Mooney Group, which targets military-linked minerals.

     A few days later the USA invaded Iran. Sri Lankan officials took time to deny any prior indication of the attacks on Iran by ‘Webby’ Koehler, who appears to have inured the country in his web. Koehler’s 2^nd visit took place midst the International Fleet Review & multilateral naval exercise MILAN 2026, organized by the Indian Navy in the port of Visakhapatnam from Feb 15-25. Participating Iranian warships had left India’s territorial waters before the US war broke out, and entered into international waters. It was Koehler’s command that alerted Sri Lanka, on the morning of March 4, on the sinking of the unarmed Iranian Dena (see ee 28 March 2026).

     When news started to filter out about official Indian & Sri Lankan complicity in the US ambush, US Special Envoy (US ambassador to India) Sergio ‘Gorgeous’ Gor rushed to Colombo, staying rather long from March 19-24. Gor met President Dissanayake, ‘but apart from an ‘X’ post by the president, with a formal handshake photo,” there was little other publicity regarding this visit on the Sri Lankan side’. However, the very next day after Gor’s arrival, on March 20, over 2 weeks after the ambush, & under Gor’s watchful gaze, President Dissanayake revealed in parliament, that on Feb 26 – the same day that the government received a request from 3 Iranian ships to make goodwill visits on March 9 & 13 – there was a request also from the USA for 2 fighter aircraft from Djibouti, to be allowed to land at Sri Lanka’s Mattala International Airport. ‘Even at that time there were signs of imminent war. We took the position of protecting our country’s neutrality (‘madyastha bhavaya’). We turned down both requests.’

      Sri Lanka’s National Joint Committee (NJC) has reiterated Sri Lanka’s pathbreaking call for the Golu Muhudha (Indian Ocean) as a Zone of Peace and demanding compensation for the human & ecological costs following the Dena disaster. The effect of the NJC’s call can be measured by the response made by the USA’s principal diplomatic instrument Prasad Kariyawasam (a paid agent of the US Development Alternatives Institute – a CIA front & implementing agency for USAID) pooh-poohing the ‘reflexive citation’ of such demands (see ee Quotes, UN Jawjaw).

*

‘The prices are going up… gonna hurt people little bit…

But they still have money to spend. They still have jobs.

Markets are unpredictable, & they are looking at what

could go wrong. We should all hope nothing goes wrong,

We should all hope these bad people… that we should win

this thing… clean up the straits, & Iran is no longer a

threat to anybody… the markets will be concerned until its

over… it’s much more important that this be successfully

completed, than what the market does… I hear some

people say they weren’t an imminent threat… these

people have been doing something bad for 47 years.’

– JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon

JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie ‘Demon’ Dimon (aka Papademetriou), a New York son of immigrant Greek bankers (Greek shippers have been making a killing off the US wars, see ee Quotes), is credited with pushing the US President to continue bombing West Asia, just after Trump had decided to admit the USA had failed in their warring (see ee Quotes, Real Power). JPMorgan Chase is a leading investor in US wars. A supine media who look for ways to absolve the US government for these wars  would rather blame a psychotic Trump or craven Jews, have now taken to claiming the Iranian leadership has been rendered either non-existent, or divided among themselves. But now we know, that it is Trump’s mind, which is divided, cluttered as it is by the shifting market-compliant caprices of bankers & real-estate agents and weapons merchants & shaky US Republican Party midterm aspirants. (see ee Quotes, Massivest Murderers – The 5 largest military firms on the planet are exclusively US) 

*

‘Its tracking signal indicated it was heading toward Singapore.

The Tifani has in recent years carried out numerous ship-to-ship

oil transfers off Singapore & Malaysia & made multiple round

trips between this area & destinations including Iran & China.’

– see ee Sovereignty, US intercepts sanctioned oil tanker

between SL & Strait of Malacca

The USA is blocking Sri Lanka’s access to oil exacerbating the enormous prices the country is paying for energy. It is now clear that it is the US (and their insurance agents) who all along has been blockading the Straits of Hormuz. The USA claims it is only Iranian oil tankers they’re intercepting, yet they are also escalating their piracy throughout the Indian Ocean, taking the opportunity to spread their warring to Sri Lanka’s doorstep once again (see ee Sovereignty, USA Imposes Worldwide Blockade on Iran’s sea trade, redirects tankers away from India, Malaysia & SL).  

     The US actions have ensued, despite Sri Lanka’s recent ‘temporary’ suspension of our tea-for-oil barter arrangement with Iran. This was to apparently ‘avoid exceeding the $250mn repayment target of the Ceylon Petroleum Corporation (CPC)’, according to the Tea Board (SLTB). Sri Lanka has to repay a $251mn oil debt to Iran with tea, a deal agreed upon in December 2021. The SLTB was rather quick to add, this has nothing to do with the US war. They do not mention the US threats.

     Sri Lankan officials finally admitted last week, after the usual PR ambiguities, that they had paid, what London’s Financial Times called ‘eye-watering’ prices for oil. It is still unclear who Sri Lanka paid such prices to. The government has also been ambiguous about buying oil directly from Russia, too. Perhaps, they rather prefer to go through the complex of middlemen buying Russian oil via India & Singapore. Many middlemen between Sri Lanka & Singapore & India stand to gain – some have tagged it the Colombo-Madras–Singapore Chettiar Mahendran Pipeline – it’s no wonder Sri Lanka won’t buy Russian oil directly – there’s just too many commissioners’ palms to oil! Indeed, it is these very same Singapore middlemen who gained in the scuttling & delaying of DJ ‘Laxapana’ Wimalasurendra’s vision to make the country self-sufficient in energy, a century ago.

‘In a series of speeches made at the State Council,

especially during 1933-34, Wimalasurendra identified

the broad alliance that worked against the Hydroelectric

Scheme. He used different names at times to identify this

alliance: ‘Big Business’, ‘Oil & Coal Combine’, ‘Almighty

Oil Interests’, ‘Big Business & Alien Combines’, ‘Imperialistic

Element’, ‘Big Business Element’, ‘Big Business Party’…’

– BD Witharana, Negotiating Power & Constructing

the Nation: Engineering in SL (see ee 1 Aug 2020)

Let us recall the principal agents thwarting Wimalasurendra included such colonial politicians as the gem merchant and Minister of Communications & Works, knighted ‘Sir’ Muhammed Macan Markar; English colonial officials (related to English engineering firms), as well as the coal-, oil- & steel-importing Boustead Bros, Shell Oil, and Whitehall Securities Corporation (now Pearson plc, the major textbook publisher & exam conductor that once owned London’s Financial Times & sonorous sermonizer The Economist).

     Similar deep-penetration saboteurs are at work to block Sri Lanka now developing Trincomalee:

The Trincomalee energy hub is no longer a matter of strategic

vision. It is fast becoming an urgency for execution.

– see ee Sovereignty, Trincomalee energy hub back

in focus as SL deals with fallout from US war

*

Is it more than cute that the Sri Lankan media focused on the visit of Indian Vice President CP Radhakrishnan, rather than on Indian Foreign Secretary Vikram Misri, who accompanied the VP. It turns out that the ‘implementation of the Trincomalee petroleum project in a meaningful way is being felt across the board…[and] the matter was discussed’. The Kashmiri Pandit Misri told a ‘post-discussion press conference on Sunday evening that there was no time to lose on a strategic project such as this, but no timeline could be fixed for its conclusion given its complexity and significant financial requirements’. Misri once also served in Sri Lanka as Deputy High Commissioner from September 2008 to Sept 2011, during and after the ‘conclusion’ of a terrorist war that India had sponsored, ensuring that little postwar ‘reconciliation’ including economic reconstruction could take place minus Indian proprietorship.

     Misri once again, rather yawningly, called on ‘business entities & commercial entities to look at opportunities in Sri Lanka’. He happily ignores that Indians (Muslims & Tamil traders) already control – albeit as agents of foreign multinational corporations (MNCs) – large swathes of Sri Lanka’s economy, using token Sinhala fronts to grease the wheels. He did add: ‘On that front, I think there has been one significant development recently, which is the investment in Colombo Dockyard.’ There has been rising concern over the Indian military’s grabbing of an important company, which recalls Sri Lanka’s historical shipbuilding industry that was sabotaged by the English (see ee Sovereignty, Shenali Waduge’s ‘Silent shift in SL from Sovereign Control to India-centric System Dependence’). However, it is the ongoing blockage of any attempt by Sri Lanka to attain energy security & sovereignty that has continuously drawn outrage (see ee Quotes, India Blocks out Trinco). History again, shows us why:

‘The Trincomalee tank farm was constructed in the 1930s to supply

the English Navy across the Indian Ocean & beyond. The facility

houses 99 storage tanks. A pipeline that once connected the tanks

with the jetty existed in the past, but no trace of it remains today.

A feasibility study is needed to locate it.’

Rather than advance Trincomalee’s clear potential as an industrial base, more fanciful fantasies that would cripple us even further are being proposed. These include: ‘India-SL energy connectivity’, with ‘a multipurpose pipeline’ to ‘strengthen regional energy security’.

*

Treasury Fraud & Hacking Kites – If it is to be believed: The Australian High Commissioner Matthew Duckworth and Indian Consul General in Jaffna S Sai Murali were flying kites in Jaffna as the chief guests at a kite festival i January, when official Australian loan-sharks quietly informed Sri Lanka that debts had not been paid on time, after the Ministry of Finance systems were purportedly hacked. How did we incur debts to Australia? We are now buying Australian parippu, and millions are drained for youth to be degreed as dubious accountants that can’t count what really matters. And so we didn’t pay up on time, & thus, the media takes to their famed pastime: awash in teary cries of scandal and crisis, either by brain-drained academics in the USA or the Hague, or aspiring politicians, one after another, who endlessly scream corruption this & corruption that –  such superficial sensationalism being their bread & butter, or arrack & soda. But what exactly is the crisis, as SBD de Silva, liked to ask? The romantic Leftists, he liked to point out, were always claiming, such & such a calamity was lurking around the hairpin bend, at the edge of an abyss. But what, actually, yawns?    

*

Banks in Sri Lanka have earned Rs539.2bn in profits, but from where did these profits come? Over half a trillion! It turns out that banks have been robbing people – and not the other way around as the media loves to headline. This ee exposes the real bank frauds ­that have been taking place. No, it is not just from hackers laundering their loot from a leaky Treasury or a privatized ‘development’ bank, hijacked to sell suppurating Scandinavian batteries to unsuspecting rural folk. Nor is it the cosy cartels wherein the external auditors of NDB Bank having been Ernst & Young (of which the Managing Partner is Duminda Hulangamuwa – Senior Economic Adviser to the President) will now be replaced by another US agency, KPMG. All these goings-on are all very legal, too (see ee Focus)

Nearly 1 rupee in every 3 of banking profit was extracted

not through the intermediation of credit, not through

financing a factory or funding an export order, but

through transaction charges, account maintenance

fees, service levies, & penalty income imposed on

a customer base that has nowhere else to go.

This is as we suspected – the prevention of investment in modern industry is the real corruption, the real fraud, in fact, and the sabotage by merchants of any such endeavours (see ee Random Notes, Bengal). This ee Focus reproduces Bradley Emerson’s eye-popping expose of the banking business which baldly asks, Are Banks Making Profits at the Cost of the Economy? He answers with a resounding Yes! These profits have not come from helping the economy recover but from stealing ‘fees’, etc. Ah! The old ‘commiss!’ Ah! the high commissioners! The digitalization the tech bros love to extol has not helped the small & the medium shop or workshop, the media thrill to sanctify, but have only helped themselves to even more. Indeed, Emerson offers more proof these banks are sharks bleeding their victims. And they are not really banks at all, refusing to invest in productive assets, or in upskilling people. Meanwhile, the World Bank living in la-la-land, Washington DC, is insisting that it is the private sector that can employ people with dignity:

‘Without stronger growth & greater private investment,

the economy will create only around 300,000 new formal

jobs – leaving roughly 7 out of every 10 young job seekers

without access to a quality job’ – ee Economists, USA’s

World Bank Group promotes Private-sector-led job creation

Yet the private sector has consistently refused to employ people with dignity. While the merchant media hangs halos around the heads of these traders, who they love to claim are always beset by corrupt politicians & commission-sucking bureaucrats, this ee offers a cameo of one of Sri Lanka’s beloved political leaders, SA Wickramasinghe, the Morawaka Atamassa, as the benighted Sir DB Jayatilleke liked to call him. Wickramasinghe’s classic contributions to a sovereign pharmaceutical policy, by joining with pharmacologist Senaka Bibile (an LSSP member), to bring about the State Pharmaceutical Corporation (SPC), is recalled by Shiran Illanperuma. He projects SA’s life story through the travails of the country, from the colonial shotguns of 1915, to the campaigns for local language in official usage, and relief from malarial pestilence, leading to the real-world-conscious resistance that set up of the Ceylon Communist Party. SA’s analysis of the colonial plantation economy led to an alternative outlook, encapsulated in SA publishing The Way Ahead: an Economic Policy for Ceylon in 1955. Illanperuma describes the context: how commodity prices had collapsed after the USA’s war on Korea, the 1953 Hartal against World Bank demanded price increases, and the formation of the SLFP, even as the Soviet Union & China were consolidating agrarian reform & large-scale industrialization.

     Illanperuma summarizes the book’s survey of the character of the ruling class, the structure of plantation economy, the resulting agroecological disasters, Sri Lanka’s natural resources, and a critique of imperialist-backed development projects.

*

‘The central economic question in our country today

is the development of the rural productive forces.’

– GVS de Silva, 1973

We recall SBD de Silva’s sarcastic comment that if the 2004 tsunami had wiped out the port of Colombo, this would have enabled Sri Lanka to advance economically. He was referring to the parasitism of the countryside by the urban-based import-export economy. And this is the subject of GVS de Silva’s discussion as ee Focus continues reproducing his book Some Heretical Thoughts on Economic Development. The timing is redolent and apt. Energy prices are skyrocketing. Remittances drying up. Calling for ‘The Development of the Rural Productive Forces’, he points out how rural life is doubly exploited, both by the towns and by the colonial relationship between country and the imperialist centres:

‘The development of the urban productive forces is helplessly dependent on foreign equipment, technology, inputs and expertise.’ Our hydra-headed ‘foreign exchange problems’ can be more easily resolved by ‘the swift development of the productive forces [that] exist in the rural, but not in the urban sector’. GVS was writing when Vietnam, whose cities had been destroyed by US bombers, by relying on their rural powers, had yet defeated the imperialists, who there too had threatened to send them back to the ‘stone age’. Such hidden strengths can only be unleashed by changing ‘relations between the rural economy & the urban economy, and the relations within the rural economy itself’.

     GVS then describes the economic parasitism that saps rural-urban relations: the super profits appropriated by the urban traders in rural produce and the shilling of imported industrial products, alongside the roles of the urban transport contractor and absentee landlordism that siphon the rural surplus to the towns. He then proposed solutions such as cooperatives and banking that invests their profits in rural industry, giving a very high priority to rural electrification, with related equipment & parts made in the villages themselves:

Agricultural experimentation must be done in the cultivator’s field

& technical improvisation in the village smithy, with the

full & intelligent participation of the rural people.

GVS called for ‘subordinating the urban to the rural economy’. Our ‘grossly underutilized’ urban talent must plan & direct an attack on rural economic backwardness, and ‘most importantly, the rural producer must have preference over the urban consumer, and the rural consumer preference over the urban producer’.He concludedthat a ‘genuine national culture can never flourish in the arid wasteland of our urban cosmopolitanism’ (see ee Focus).

*

• One of the much-advertized myths about English rule in colonial Ceylon is how great & white & pure & clean & (add another adjectival noun) was the colonial civil & public service. And how us brown natives ruined it. First, it is important to note here that the early crop of planters in Sri Lanka & India were those who had ‘operated slave labor’ in the USA. The collusion between English officials, judges & police with planters & merchants, in the oppression & exploitation of workers, is the subject of this ee Focus‘ excerpt of SBD de Silva’s classic The Political Economy of Underdevelopment.

     Here SBD provides much evidence of the inadequacies of the laws meant to protect workers, and the courts’ collusion & lax treatment of planters who, after all, were their compatriots. The Cooly Wages Ordinance was undermined by magistrates and ‘Court decisions generally condoned breaches of the law by planters’. Officials themselves had their own private interests, and many spent more time looking after their businesses. Planters behaved like kings in their district domains, threatening the few government officials who tried to do their jobs, while defaulting on wages, falsifying accounts, and whipping workers… How they sanitized these practices and painted themselves whiter than white is another ‘postcolonial’ tale yet to be told…

*

________

Contents:

A Short History of English Corruption in the Colonial Civil Service of Ceylon