Import of 1000 pickups and other vehicles not because of elections, says Finance Ministry
Ms Kalyani Dahanayake, Director-General (IT Management) at the Ministry of Finance has sent in a response to last week’s article published in the Business Times under the heading “Treasury ignores A/R, F/Rs to import 1000 pickup vehicles for state agencies” and said the report is “completely fallacious”.
The letter says:
The General Treasury declares that the transaction with respect to the importation of 1000 pickup vehicles has been made in full, accordance with the financial regulations and other administrative provision.
As per the approval of the Cabinet of Ministers, vehicles for all the Government entities are purchased by the Treasury under a leasing plan of paying off the amount within a period of five years through the Bank of Ceylon. This fulfils the long felt vehicle requirements of the Government entities, while minimizing the weight on the expenditure votes of the Budget due to the paying off plan within the 5-year period.
Therefore, this is not a purchase of vehicles that has been made targeting a certain election but the normal procedure was adopted in purchasing vehicles since 2011. Accordingly, 2363 vehicles including double cabs, motor vehicles, ambulances, vans have been imported from Associated Motorways (Pvt) Ltd and Toyota Lanka (Pvt) Ltd under the leasing plan by the Treasury for Government institutions as at 31.12.2013.
Quotations have been called by the Bank of Ceylon on 04.04.2014 for the purchases stated in the aforementioned news article. Subsequent to the evaluations and based on the recommendations made by the Bank of Ceylon orders have been placed to make purchases from the following companies which have quoted the lowest prices for each category of vehicles on 11.06.2014 and 03.09.2014.
Therefore, the Treasury emphasizes that the tenders for purchasing all the vehicles have been awarded to the companies which had submitted the lowest bids, following a transparent procedure. Provisions required for paying the installments for all the above purchases have been allocated in the Budget estimates. If the newspaper company made an inquiry from the relevant Ministry, publication of such fallacious information could have been prevented.”
Reporter notes: Nowhere in our article have we mentioned that these 1000 vehicles were ‘targeting a certain election’. We cannot understand why the Finance Ministry is denying something we have not stated and clearly misunderstood our words “on the eve of the 2015 budget”.
The Ministry statement says that “Accordingly 2363 vehicles including double cabs, motor vehicles, ambulances, vans have been imported from Associated Motorways (Pvt) Ltd, under the leasing plan by the Treasury for Government institutions as at 31-12-2013” but fails to mention the largest beneficiary United Motors (UML) and the 1000 Double Cabs, except in the table given in the statement.
This would imply that UML was asked to import the double cabs without any regulation.
While our article highlighted only one transaction, it is good, in the context of transparency, that the Treasury is now releasing details of other vehicle purchases too. If not for our story, the public would have been unaware of such a huge transaction using public funds.
With reference to Ms. Dahanayake’s claim that the newspaper should have clarified this information from the ministry first (a standard response from a state institution when they refuse to speak in the first instance), it is well known that government institutions are the hardest to get information in the public interest. At the ministry, only the Treasury Secretary who is the chief accounting officer of the ministry is authorised to speak to the media and cannot be contacted due to his busy schedule.
Other senior officials are not permitted to speak to the media. If Ms. Dahanayake is prepared to be the media spokesperson for the ministry and answer all the queries in future, we (and the public) would be delighted.
This kind of clampdown on information is why there is a need for a Right to Information Act, which the media and civil society have been clamouring for a long time.