{"id":67771,"date":"2017-07-12T15:36:51","date_gmt":"2017-07-12T22:36:51","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.lankaweb.com\/news\/items\/?p=67771"},"modified":"2017-07-12T15:36:51","modified_gmt":"2017-07-12T22:36:51","slug":"cabinet-shuts-down-the-fraud-committee","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.lankaweb.com\/news\/items\/2017\/07\/12\/cabinet-shuts-down-the-fraud-committee\/","title":{"rendered":"CABINET SHUTS DOWN THE \u2018FRAUD\u2019 COMMITTEE"},"content":{"rendered":"<h2><span style=\"color: #0000ff;\"><em><strong>By Denagama Dammika Ranaweera\u00a0Courtesy Ceylon Today<\/strong><\/em><\/span><\/h2>\n<p>The Cabinet of Ministers yesterday decided to close down the Anti-Corruption Committee Secretariat. At the meeting, Prime Minister Ranil Wickremesinghe presented to the Cabinet a summary of the activities carried out to date by the Anti-Corruption Committee Secretariat that was set up after the Presidential Election in January 2015 on a recommendation to the Cabinet by Prime Minister Ranil Wickremesinghe himself.<\/p>\n<p>It was intended to be a high-powered committee that met weekly to review progress in anti-corruption probes.<\/p>\n<p>Yesterday&#8217;s decision comes in the wake of harsh criticism by President Maithripala Sirisena of the Anti-Corruption Committee Secretariat at last week&#8217;s Cabinet meeting. Cabinet Spokesman Minister Rajitha Senaratne then told journalists that the Cabinet will discuss the matter further at yesterday&#8217;s Cabinet meeting.<\/p>\n<p>He added that the Secretariat was only investigating minor fraud allegations and that very many SLFP MPs feel that it is deliberately targeting its members over trivial matters. &#8220;Although the monthly expenditure for the upkeep of the Anti-Corruption Committee Secretariat is Rs 12 million, it only has six investigators and one consultant investigator but has five directors and five consultants.<\/p>\n<p>We promised the people that we will punish financial criminals but we have done nothing. People are losing faith,&#8221; he said.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>By Denagama Dammika Ranaweera\u00a0Courtesy Ceylon Today The Cabinet of Ministers yesterday decided to close down the Anti-Corruption Committee Secretariat. At the meeting, Prime Minister Ranil Wickremesinghe presented to the Cabinet a summary of the activities carried out to date by the Anti-Corruption Committee Secretariat that was set up after the Presidential Election in January 2015 [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[106],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-67771","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-106"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lankaweb.com\/news\/items\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/67771","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=67771"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.lankaweb.com\/news\/items\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/67771\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lankaweb.com\/news\/items\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=67771"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lankaweb.com\/news\/items\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=67771"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lankaweb.com\/news\/items\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=67771"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}