{"id":83523,"date":"2018-11-20T15:42:31","date_gmt":"2018-11-20T22:42:31","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.lankaweb.com\/news\/items\/?p=83523"},"modified":"2018-11-20T15:42:31","modified_gmt":"2018-11-20T22:42:31","slug":"speaker-way-off-mark-on-parliament-costs","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.lankaweb.com\/news\/items\/2018\/11\/20\/speaker-way-off-mark-on-parliament-costs\/","title":{"rendered":"Speaker way off mark on parliament costs"},"content":{"rendered":"<h2><span style=\"color: #0000ff;\"><em>By Shamindra Ferdinando\u00a0Courtesy The Island<\/em><\/span><\/h2>\n<p>The People\u2019s Action for Free and Fair Election (PAFFREL) Executive Director Rohana Hettiarachchi told The Island that a single parliamentary session cost Sri Lankan taxpayer a whopping Rs 25,721,413 mn and not Rs 4.6 mn to Rs 5mn as previously estimated.<\/p>\n<p>The civil society activist said that the PAFFREL had recently obtained parliamentary expenses in terms of the Right to Information Law.<\/p>\n<p>According to K.A. Rohanadeera, Assistant Secretary General of Parliament made available to The Island by PAFFREL, 95 sittings in 2017 had cost Rs 2,443,534,315.<\/p>\n<p>When The Island pointed out that Speaker Karu Jayasuriya had estimated the cost of a single sitting at about Rs. 5 million, Hettiarachchi said obviously the accounts taken into consideration now and then were different.<\/p>\n<p>Hettiarachchi said that massive expenditure the country incurred in maintaining parliament should be examined in the context of extremely poor performance of lawmakers.<\/p>\n<p>Hettiarachchi said that in response to his RTI query, the parliament had acknowledged that the House didn\u2019t maintain a record of lawmakers\u2019 absences even on days sittings were suspended for want of a quorum, which is 20 MPs.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>By Shamindra Ferdinando\u00a0Courtesy The Island The People\u2019s Action for Free and Fair Election (PAFFREL) Executive Director Rohana Hettiarachchi told The Island that a single parliamentary session cost Sri Lankan taxpayer a whopping Rs 25,721,413 mn and not Rs 4.6 mn to Rs 5mn as previously estimated. The civil society activist said that the PAFFREL had [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[118,106],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-83523","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-corruption-and-bribery","category-106"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lankaweb.com\/news\/items\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/83523","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=83523"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.lankaweb.com\/news\/items\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/83523\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lankaweb.com\/news\/items\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=83523"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lankaweb.com\/news\/items\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=83523"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lankaweb.com\/news\/items\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=83523"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}