Financial Times

No more roadshows for Board Of Investment
Pensions, VRS, two overseas offices on the cards by April 2005
By Feizal Samath
The Board Of Investment (BOI) is pulling back on expensive roadshows - a popular mechanism used in the past to attract foreign investment, preparing a pension plan and VRS (Voluntary Retirement Scheme) for its staff and hoping to open overseas offices in Bangalore and Shanghai.

These are envisaged under a massive reorganisation and restructure of the country's premier investment agency expected to be completed by April 2005, according to Saliya Wickremasuriya, BOI chairman and managing director.

"The (reorganisation) plan will be ready by February. Implementation will take until end-April at least, as some changes may be quite deep," he told The Sunday Times FT in an interview. The BOI chief, with wide international marketing and management experience and appointed in July this year, responded to questions over the telephone and on email.

In an unusual move, the re-organisation and modernisation of the agency is being driven by its own employees who have broken into seven groups and assigned tasks like seeking new ways of business generation, identification and proper screening of investors, transparency in approvals and increasing the percentage of projects progressing from agreement to implementation and, reducing the time for this to happen.

Asked about possible downsizing plans, Wickremasuriya said downsizing is not being contemplated. "There will be a fair VRS created out of the re-structure of the Compensation and Benefits package but employees would be under no compulsion to take it. At the same time we will also introduce a pension scheme along with a more structured career development path which may encourage retention of high performers," he added, providing details of the agency's future direction.

The compensation and career structure would be more performance-based than seniority-dependant to encourage the delivery of a high quality service, according to the plan. The pension scheme would be a contributory one with the BOI contribution being sizable.

On roadshows, the BOI chief said they were pulling back on this exercise and would instead target specific sectors and more so, specific companies. Wickremasuriya believes this approach would yield higher quality results than "casting a wider net in the hope of pulling passing investors in." Sri Lanka's foreign missions would be roped in extensively in this focused strategy. Wickremasuriya said his own travel in the past five months has been as part of state delegations and not BOI investment promotion missions.

The BOI hopes to open new offices in Bangalore and Shanghai with negotiations now currently on in this connection. It has also applied for a EU Small Projects Facility grant in which the maximum available is 1.6 million Euros for 2005.

The agency is also negotiating with its landlord, the World Trade Centre (WTC) in an effort to reduce its space on a cost basis there and possibly move back office functions to the BOI building at Baron Jayatillake Mawatha. "We have a lease commitment to WTC to honour before we can consider moving headquarters to another location if we so wish," he said.

This is also in line with re-distributing staff to the regions under the revised objectives of the BOI in which strengthening its presence in the provinces is one key component of the new plan.

He said the re-structure from the BOI wouldn't require extra funds. "Our UNDP facilitation is free to us from Invest-In-Peace, with only miscellaneous incidentals to BOI account. The rest of the effort is all by employees on their own time and departmental budgets."

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