Roar about bringing back stolen money, a fiction – SLPP MP
Sri Lanka Podujana Peramuna (SLPP) MP Sanjeeva Edirimanna said that the story about bringing back the stolen money to Sri Lanka is a fiction created by the opposition itself.
He stated this while attending a media conference held yesterday at the SLPP party headquarters. “These days, the biggest topic on the political stages is theft and recovery of stolen resources. This is being discussed very seriously. Apart from that, it doesn’t seem to say anything big about how the money is brought back,” Edirimanna said.
In the 2015 presidential election campaign, the main political slogan of the then opposition was to bring back the stolen money to the state.
A national anti-corruption committee was formed and all political parties, except our group, were members of it. A separate organizational structure was established for that purpose called the Police Financial Crime Division. We remember that officers and members of certain institutions even went to foreign countries and conducted various investigations.
There was an international anti-corruption conference in London on May 11, 2016. The then President participated on behalf of Sri Lanka. There, they explained to the world the programme they are carrying out to catch theft. Not only that, when the then American Secretary of State John Kerry came to this country, the main topic of the bilateral discussion between the government representatives of Sri Lanka and the American representatives was that they asked us to help them catch thieves, MP Edirimanna added.
He added that then Foreign Minister Mangala Samaraweera said that the Rajapaksa’s have assets of US$ 18 billion abroad. Samaraweera said he would bring them.
The topic of stealing the country’s resources and bringing them back to the country has been discussed before by these people. These people are bringing the same topic again and again probably because there is nothing else to talk about in an election. It has been confirmed that these statements made by them themselves are fiction. Therefore, I request those parties who are very active in the election campaign that you yourself have confirmed this story before and that it is a fiction without truth, he added.
“Therefore, we must talk about the programme related to the national economy of this country. The most important discussion at this moment should be the programme of those who are aspiring to be future leaders for the re-establishment of the national economy of the country. They are again discussing the same fictional story that they themselves have done before. I think that I understand that the audience will ask questions at some point. They themselves have turned the story about the thefts and their repatriation into a lie,” he added.