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CBK’s Rs. 600m. checkmated again
By Our Political Editor
President Mahinda Rajapaksa this week flatly refused a request by former President Chandrika Bandaranaike Kumaratunga to return the Rs. 600 million that was confiscated from her private Trust after she transferred the amount from the President's Fund on the eve of her relinquishing office.

Former President Kumaratunga had made a plea for the money to be returned during a private one-on-one meeting she had requested with President Rajapaksa. They had met on Wednesday evening at Temple Trees, the official office cum residence of President Rajapaksa.

The request for this money (Rs. 600 million) came on the same day that she issued a media statement saying that she was returning the estimated Rs. 300 million one-and-a-half-acre State land at Madiwela near the Parliament complex without giving any specific reason why she was returning the free-hold property to which deeds had been written.

In a letter to Urban Development Minister Dinesh Gunawardene, former President Kumaratunga had only given the background to why she was given this state land, and said that she will now accept only her security, vehicles and office staff entitlements.The move, however, came against the backdrop of the Rajapaksa Administration seeking legal opinon on the validity of the transaction, and a court case initiated by civic groups.

The same evening as she released her media statement on this decision of hers, she had gone to see President Rajapaksa and argued that the transfer of the Rs. 600 million from the President's Fund where she was the chairperson, to a private Trust of which she was the founder was " not illegal ".
The former President had given her approval as chairperson of the President's Fund to pull out Rs. 600 million from that Fund and send the money to her private trust titled Presidential Cultural and Sports Centres Fund only a week before the November 17 Presidential elections last year. The money was transferred from the President's Fund to the trust the day before the elections.

The other members of the private trust include her one-time education ministry secretary Tara de Mel, the additional secretary of the President's Fund Chitra Athurugiriya, deputy minister Arjuna Ranatunga and former sprint queen Susanthika Jayasinghe.

President Rajapaksa had given a directive to the banks to stop payment of these vast sums of money, and later cancelled these cheques. President Rajapaksa had told the former President that even if the transfer was not "illegal", the issue of propriety was what was at stake. He had told Ms. Kumaratunga that these were public funds, and the people would blame him for squandering public funds.

The President had refused the request of the former President to have the cheques amounting to Rs. 600 million returned to her. This request was among several other requests made by the former President (please see political commentary on page 10).

Meanwhile, lawyers were studying whether in a separate transaction (The Sunday Times of January 29, 2006 ), former President Chandrika Kumaratunga had committed an act of corruption under the terms of the Bribery and Corruption Law in granting UDA property ear-marked for a 'public purpose' to a group of investors by misleading her own Cabinet.

Government investigations so far have revealed that a close personal friend of the former President, who resides in the UK, but arrived in Colombo this week, profited by this transaction. While her friend is now required to pay taxes on an estimated Rs. 60 million he had made from this transaction, lawyers are probing whether the former President can be brought to book for personally profiteering from the transaction she had initiated herself.

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