{"id":46028,"date":"2015-07-22T11:37:51","date_gmt":"2015-07-22T18:37:51","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.lankaweb.com\/news\/items\/?p=46028"},"modified":"2015-07-22T11:53:58","modified_gmt":"2015-07-22T18:53:58","slug":"the-multi-bond-circus","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.lankaweb.com\/news\/items\/2015\/07\/22\/the-multi-bond-circus\/","title":{"rendered":"The Multi-Bond Circus"},"content":{"rendered":"

The Nation<\/em><\/span><\/h2>\n

The Colombo District Court has issued an enjoining order preventing the publication or circulation of the COPE sub-committee report on the Central Bank bond issue until July 23.\u00a0 This order is sequent to a petition filed by Sujeewa Senasinghe (UNP).<\/p>\n

We can still talk of \u2018bonds\u2019.\u00a0 There\u2019s still a word called \u2018cope\u2019.\u00a0 There are no enjoining orders from the courts preventing us from writing about such things.\u00a0 For now.<\/p>\n

There are bonds between man (women too) and the earth, Chief Seattle tells us.\u00a0 Bonds between men and men.\u00a0 There is a bond between President Maithripala Sirisena and Ranil Wickremesinghe.\u00a0 The former is President thanks to the latter and the latter the Prime Minister thanks to the former.\u00a0 \u2018Multi-bond\u2019 one might say.<\/p>\n

We can\u2019t publish or circulate, but can talk about the circumstances regarding bonds and how to cope with them.\u00a0 So here goes.<\/p>\n

Sirisena did not and cannot say that dissolving Parliament had anything to do with some report on a bond- issue compiled by or to be compiled by the Committee on Public Enterprises (COPE).<\/p>\n

But there\u2019s something Sirisena DID say.\u00a0 He said \u2018I asked the Prime Minister to ask Central Bank Governor Arjuna Mahendran to resign.\u2019\u00a0 Now why should Sirisena want Mahendran to resign if Mahendran has done no wrong (directly, as the all-UNP team appointed by the UNP leader to investigate the bond issue concluded) or indirectly (as is usually the case in \u2018insider trading\u2019)? Did Sirisena peek into the COPE report?\u00a0 Did Sirisena have some \u2018inside\u2019 information?\u00a0 Was he trying to save himself or his bond-brother Ranil from possible embarrassment? Indeed is it possible embarrassment that prompted Senasinghe to seek \u2018relief\u2019 from the Colombo District Court?<\/p>\n

If Sirisena did ask Ranil to ask Mahendran to resign, then we have to ask \u2018what happened thereafter?\u2019\u00a0 Well, Sirisena didn\u2019t tell us when he made this request.\u00a0 What we do know is that Mahendran did not resign and hasn\u2019t made any statement on the matter.\u00a0 Even is Sirisena had made such a request we don\u2019t know if Ranil conveyed it to Mahendran.\u00a0 Even if he had done so, it is clear that Mahendran didn\u2019t want to budge.<\/p>\n

What did Mahendran do, though?\u00a0 He did something on July 15, 2015 and we\u2019ll come to that.\u00a0 On July 9, he was all smiles with the President, we know now.\u00a0 On that day President Sirisena AND Prime Minister Wickremesinghe visited the CBSL and were warmly received by\u00a0 Mahendran, members of the Monetary Board and the senior management of CBSL.\u00a0\u00a0 A new silver coin minted for the 150th Birth Anniversary of Srimath Anagarika Dharmapala was presented as a memento in mark the President\u2019s visit to the Bank.
\nIt was five days later, i.e. on the 14th, that Sirisena told the media that he had asked Ranil to obtain Mahendran\u2019s resignation.\u00a0 One day later, the CBSL website posts a picture of the President with the Governor and releases the same picture along with a caption to the press.\u00a0 Why did the CBSL wait five days to release this, especially since the CB website is relatively fast on posting information?<\/p>\n

Was Mahendran saying, one wonders, \u2018Hey Mr President, if you wanted me to resign you could have told me on the 9th noh!\u2019\u00a0 Or is he saying \u2018Ranil never passed me your message!\u2019\u00a0 Is he saying, one wonders, \u2018Mr President, you were with the Prime Minister when the two of you met me on the 9th, but there was no talk of me resigning!\u2019\u00a0 He might be telling us \u2018Look at the picture, folks, we are all smiles, don\u2019t you think I would be pretty down in the mouth if I had been told to resign?\u2019The July 15th post in the CBSL website, therefore tells a lot and the Colombo District Court cannot do anything to kill THAT story.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The Nation The Colombo District Court has issued an enjoining order preventing the publication or circulation of the COPE sub-committee report on the Central Bank bond issue until July 23.\u00a0 This order is sequent to a petition filed by Sujeewa Senasinghe (UNP). We can still talk of \u2018bonds\u2019.\u00a0 There\u2019s still a word called \u2018cope\u2019.\u00a0 There […]<\/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-46028","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-forum"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lankaweb.com\/news\/items\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/46028","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=46028"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.lankaweb.com\/news\/items\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/46028\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lankaweb.com\/news\/items\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=46028"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lankaweb.com\/news\/items\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=46028"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lankaweb.com\/news\/items\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=46028"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}