{"id":45085,"date":"2015-06-29T21:33:51","date_gmt":"2015-06-30T03:33:51","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.lankaweb.com\/news\/items\/?p=45085"},"modified":"2015-06-29T14:33:09","modified_gmt":"2015-06-29T21:33:09","slug":"gl-mahendran-trade-fire-over-bond-scam-pm-making-suggestions-to-officials-including-governor-cb-appropriate","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.lankaweb.com\/news\/items\/2015\/06\/29\/gl-mahendran-trade-fire-over-bond-scam-pm-making-suggestions-to-officials-including-governor-cb-appropriate\/","title":{"rendered":"GL, Mahendran trade fire over bond scam -\u2018PM making suggestions to officials, including Governor, CB appropriate\u2019"},"content":{"rendered":"<h2><span style=\"color: #0000ff;\"><em>By Shamindra Ferdinando \u00a0Courtesy Island<\/em><\/span><\/h2>\n<p>The Opposition yesterday alleged that the <strong>Governor of the Central Bank Arjuna Mahendran had received instructions from Prime Minister Ranil Wickremesinghe as regards change of established procedures in the run-up to the controversial bond issue and such interventions were contrary to existing regulations.<\/strong><\/p>\n<p>Prof. Peiris told\u00a0The Island\u00a0that CB Governor himself had admitted premier Wickremesinghe\u2019s intervention when he appeared before the special parliamentary committee tasked to investigate the controversial bond issue.\u00a0The former External Affairs Minister alleged that significant changes had been made in the established procedures in contravention of monetary regulations.\u00a0He said that the Governor couldn\u2019t have received instructions or advise as regards the bond issue, though the PM as the line minister in charge of CB had the authority to give directives pertaining to specific matters.<\/p>\n<p>Prof. Peiris said PM Wickremesinghe had pushed for the dissolution of\u00a0parliament to thwart release of parliamentary investigation report.<\/p>\n<p>Admitting that he had received suggestions from Premier Wickremesinghe, CB Governor Mahendran said: &#8220;The. Prime Minister is the Minister in charge of the Ministry of Policy Planning, Economic Affairs, Child, Youth and Cultural Affairs, which is the line Ministry in charge of the Central Bank of Sri Lanka (CBSL).\u00a0The Prime Minister made this comment at the regular weekly meeting of the Cabinet Subcommittee on Economic Affairs as it is an issue of vital economic importance in Sri Lanka. The Governor of the CBSL is a regular invitee to meetings on economic affairs where issues of vital national importance relating to the economy are discussed. There is nothing therefore inappropriate for the Prime Minister to make suggestions to various officials including the Governor of the CBSL.&#8221;<\/p>\n<p>Mahendran alleged that\u00a0Prof. Peiris had\u00a0conveniently excluded\u00a0the context in which those remarks were made. He also had\u00a0very conveniently forgotten to mention that the depositors in the EPF and NSB\u00a0were forced to receive artificially low rates of interest as a consequence of misguided policy of the previous government to use EPF and NSB funds to artificially reduce interest rates which was not acceptable to the market.&#8221;\u00a0The CB Governor said that Prime Minister\u2019s comments should be examined against the backdrop of misguided policies of the previous administration.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>By Shamindra Ferdinando \u00a0Courtesy Island The Opposition yesterday alleged that the Governor of the Central Bank Arjuna Mahendran had received instructions from Prime Minister Ranil Wickremesinghe as regards change of established procedures in the run-up to the controversial bond issue and such interventions were contrary to existing regulations. Prof. Peiris told\u00a0The Island\u00a0that CB Governor himself [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[12],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-45085","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-forum"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lankaweb.com\/news\/items\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/45085","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lankaweb.com\/news\/items\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lankaweb.com\/news\/items\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lankaweb.com\/news\/items\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lankaweb.com\/news\/items\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=45085"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.lankaweb.com\/news\/items\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/45085\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lankaweb.com\/news\/items\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=45085"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lankaweb.com\/news\/items\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=45085"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lankaweb.com\/news\/items\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=45085"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}