It was just the other day at the Galle Face victory parade that President Mahinda Rajapaksa told the nation that this country could not be betrayed to drugs, corruption and fraud and overwhelming laziness. We must build a nation that is second to none, he stressed.

Such a statement would no doubt have warmed the cockles of many law abiding, honest citizens who want to see a country where waste and corruption, especially in high places, do not munch into the cake that is rightly the people's or erode public confidence in the way their elected representatives behave once they assume high political office.

And why not? The President has delivered on a promise - the liquidation of the dreaded LTTE and the eradication of terrorism. A leader who has kept his word, after all.

The issue of waste and corruption has been long highlighted in the media and elsewhere. The sheer lethargy on the part of the Rajapaksa administration to rectify findings of waste and corruption running into billions of rupees in public institutions contained in reams of pages in the several reports of the Auditor General and the two parliamentary committees COPE (Committee on Public Enterprises) and PAC (Public Accounts Committee) just shelved and gathering dust, has been the bone of contention to many.

The Government was excused, somewhat, on the footing that priority had to be given to the 'war effort' though there was no co-relation whatsoever between the two.

In the immediate wake of the President's pronouncement comes a much-awaited (it was an agonizing wait) judgment on the privatization of the Sri Lanka Insurance Corporation.

In a 62-page order, the Supreme Court gave a detailed account of how a Minister - past and present, the Honourable Milinda Moragoda, went behind the back of the then Cabinet and engineered the sale of one of the few Government corporations that were making a profit anyway, to a private entity. It was all hugely controversial with allegations of how the value was depreciated before sale, and monies coming from mysterious foreign bank accounts and suddenly mushrooming companies in a most dubious deal.

The judgment eventually held that the privatization of the Sri Lanka Insurance Corporation in 2002, was, inter-alia, "manipulated", "illegal" - and "shocked the conscience of the Court". It was that bad.

But what was the measure of punishment given? Yes, the venture was handed back to the Government, but where were the strictures against those who 'shocked the conscience of the Court'? There was nothing against the Honourable Minister named - and otherwise shamed in the findings of the order. As for the buyers in this "illegal" act, they get to have their money back and keep the profits they made from this "manipulated" deal.

There is justifiable disappointment that all the sound and fury of the trial has ended in a damp squib, of sorts. Especially so, when the public has been treated to, and been accustomed to scintillating judgments of the recent past in similar cases involving the Doctrine of Public Trust - when a former President -Chandrika Kumaratunga was fined (and paid) Rs. 3 million in the infamous Waters Edge case where she abused her office and allowed a friend of hers make money from the deal; when the incumbent Minister of Petroleum was asked to be sacked for his hand in the oil hedging fiasco; when the incumbent Treasury Secretary was, in fact, sacked by the Court for his complicity in the Colombo port bunkering tender - and the directors of a private company fined heavily for their part in the exercise. And in this case - how unfortunate - not even a censure.

The President told ruling party MPs that they could not use the 'war' as an excuse any longer for their shortcomings. But what has the President done, for example, the many Presidential Commission findings handed over to him, personally? Now that the 'war' is over, can he not make public the findings of the report on arms procurements of years gone by? Can he not make known the findings in the report of the Failed Finance Companies, which owed the State billions of rupees? Is not the public entitled to an explanation as to why these reports are not made public?

The great popularity the President now enjoys can be attributed to him succeeding in transforming a promise in words to a reality in deed. We shall see how he extends this to the areas of waste and corruption, which he has - only last week - pledged to do.