{"id":90156,"date":"2019-06-10T16:30:59","date_gmt":"2019-06-10T23:30:59","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.lankaweb.com\/news\/items\/?p=90156"},"modified":"2019-06-10T16:30:59","modified_gmt":"2019-06-10T23:30:59","slug":"acsa-backer-kariyawasam-now-a-paid-employee-of-us-government","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.lankaweb.com\/news\/items\/2019\/06\/10\/acsa-backer-kariyawasam-now-a-paid-employee-of-us-government\/","title":{"rendered":"ACSA backer Kariyawasam now a paid employee of US government"},"content":{"rendered":"<h2><span style=\"color: #0000ff;\"><em>Courtesy The Sunday Times<\/em><\/span><\/h2>\n\n\n<p>A former Sri Lanka diplomat and Foreign Secretary who allegedly\npressurised the Defence Ministry to rush through the Acquisition and Cross\nServicing Agreement (ACSA) between Sri Lanka and the United States is now a US\nfederal government employee.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Prasad Kariyawasam is employed by the US federal government\nbacked Agency for International Development (USAID), a federal entity. The\nagency\u2019s Colombo office has placed him as an Advisor to Parliament of Sri\nLanka. Erroneously, sometimes Mr Kariyawasam\u2019s appointment has been referred to\nas Advisor to the Speaker. The USAID has been periodically helping providing\nexperts to help Parliamentary Oversight Committees.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>As reported in the Sunday Times last week, Sri Lanka\u2019s\nAmbassador in Germany, Engineer Karunasena Hettiaratchchi, former Defence\nSecretary, told President Maithripala Sirisena on the telephone that Mr\nKariyawasam pressurised him to expedite the ACSA by obtaining Cabinet approval.\nThe ACSA was signed on August 4, 2017. This was when he was awaiting\nobservations from the armed forces commanders at that time expressing strong\nreservations. Another who mounted pressure on him, Mr Hettiaratchchi told\nPresident Sirisena, was then Foreign Minister<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>By virtue of his new USAID appointment, Mr Kariyawasam has found\nhis name in the guest lists of most western diplomatic missions in Colombo.\nLast month, he attended a dinner at Jefferson House, the official residence of\nthe US Ambassador in Sri Lanka, for former envoy Robert O\u2019Blake.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>In terms of the ACSA, a large number of US defence and military establishments have been granted access to Sri Lanka, as exclusively revealed in the Sunday Times(Political Commentary) of May 19.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><a href=\"http:\/\/www.sundaytimes.lk\/190609\/columns\/352890-352890.html\">http:\/\/www.sundaytimes.lk\/190609\/columns\/352890-352890.html<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Courtesy The Sunday Times A former Sri Lanka diplomat and Foreign Secretary who allegedly pressurised the Defence Ministry to rush through the Acquisition and Cross Servicing Agreement (ACSA) between Sri Lanka and the United States is now a US federal government employee. Prasad Kariyawasam is employed by the US federal government backed Agency for International [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":true,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-90156","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-security"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lankaweb.com\/news\/items\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/90156","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=90156"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.lankaweb.com\/news\/items\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/90156\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lankaweb.com\/news\/items\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=90156"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lankaweb.com\/news\/items\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=90156"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lankaweb.com\/news\/items\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=90156"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}