Central Bank removed from Prime Minister Wickremesinghe’s control

Sri Lankan President Maithripala Sirisena, in a move that would further distance the partners in Sri Lanka’s troubled ruling coalition, on Wednesday removed the Central Bank from the Prime Minister’s purview and transferred it to the Ministry of Finance.
The Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) was also believed to be transferred to Finance Minister Mangala Samaraweera’s list of functions, according to a Presidential gazette notification issued on Wednesday.
In the past few days, Prime Minister Ranil Wickremesinghe and his team have been resisting plans by the President to transfer the Central Bank to the Finance Ministry.  
The banking regulator has by tradition been assigned to the Finance Ministry but it was allocated to Mr. Wickremesinghe’s Ministry of National Policies and Economic Affairs when the first cabinet of ministers was appointed after the January 2015 presidential triumph by Mr. Sirisena.
At that time it was believed to have been moved out of the Finance Ministry since Minister Ravi Karunanayake had a pending case on foreign exchange issues. Calls to move the Central Bank to the Finance Ministry increased after tainted Governor Arjuna Mahendran, a close aide of the Prime Minister, was not reappointed for a second term after being implicated in an insider trading case, and Karunanayake stepped down from the finance portfolio. 
Relations between the President and the Prime Minister have worsened since the recent local government elections in which both Wickremesinghe's and Sirisena's parties fared poorly.  - ENDS -