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Shameless lack
of transparency Dark rumours
of irregularities in tenders and other transactions between government
and big business are circulating once again with renewed vigour
just like during the time of the previous PA government and past
UNP regimes. And this after only one year in power. Take the case
of the infamous bus deal - the sale of a 39 percent stake in the
six bus companies to a British company called Ibis that has no known
credentials in the transport business and its local partner, a businessman
with a bad reputation and a shady track record whose previous involvement
in the privatisation of state transport enterprises ended with disastrous
results. Results which the leaders of both the main political parties
that have ruled this country since independence, the UNP and the
SLFP, seem quite happy to ignore when in power. The extent
to which the government appears willing to go to please its financial
backers and cronies is indeed mind-boggling. The government's reluctance
to scrap the bus deal and execute the bid bond when Ibis has repeatedly
failed to honour its part of the agreement and pay up, and its willingness
to keep extending the deadline for payment is nothing short of outrageous.
In fact the government and the agency that is in charge of the transaction,
the Public Enterprises Reform Commission (PERC), are clearly violating
their own procedures and bidding rules. For an organisation that
is in charge of restructuring public assets, PERC's silence, and
that of the Finance Ministry and the Wickremesinghe regime in general,
is deafening. It is obvious that all is not well in PERC given the
mass exodus of some of its senior managers recently. It was wrong
in the first place for the government to have given the bus deal
to the same people who messed up the previous privatisation effort.
The objections to the deal raised by President Chandrika Kumaratunga
now appear valid but would have been credible only had she herself
not had any dealings with the same businessmen when her party was
in power. Even the bureaucrats
with shady reputations who were involved in previous transport privatisation
scams and who narrowly escaped being charged and convicted merely
on legal technicalities are back and playing an influential behind-the-scenes
role, albeit more discreetly. That Prime
Minister Wickremesinghe has chosen it fit to employ these same people
and house them in five-star comfort no doubt at state expense, despite
the serious doubts about their credibility, is hardly the attitude
that would give the public confidence in the honesty and transparency
of his government. This lack of transparency extends to big business and its leaders who are staunch supporters of the UNP. The sudden changes that have taken place in the top management of two conglomerates, John Keells and Aitken Spence, is a good example. There have been no clear official announcements about the reasons behind the decisions of senior management - the deputy chairman and a senior director in the case of JKH and the chairman in the case of Aitken Spence - to quit all of a sudden. In other markets the companies would have issued statements explaining the reasons for these mysterious changes. But here, despite the rhetoric about corporate transparency and good governance, it seems as if our corporate top brass have only contempt for the ordinary investor whose money they are eager to seek when their companies need cheap funds. |
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