EDITORIAL

A ken for deceit

Kandiah 'call me Ken' Balendra is not an ordinary man. Having started life as a tea planter straight out of school, he worked his way up the ladder of John Keells (then mostly a tea broking firm) eventually to succeed David Blackler as the first Sri Lankan chairman of the company. Balendra's term as chairman saw the company experience not just unprecedented growth but international recognition. John Keells was transformed from being an 'also ran' into the highest flying Sri Lankan blue-chip ever, almost single-handedly owing to Ken Balendra's outstanding ability.

Unlike his predecessors David Blackler and Mark Bostock, Balendra was careful not to annoy the government in office. He made the right noises and won rich rewards for his shareholders, not least by joining with P&O to take over much of the operations of the port of Colombo. In October 1996, when Chandrika Kumaratunga's third budget was presented in parliament amidst wide criticism, Balendra came out boldly and publicly in her support. Cynics claimed that this was because the P&O deal had recently been approved. Shareholders, who had seen their stock plummet the moment the spectre of a Kumaratunga government crept over the horizon in 1994, looked on in horror.

Balendra was not the only blue-chip supporter Kumaratunga recruited that year. By slashing excise duty on beer, she inveigled the Ceylon Brewery's Mano and Hari Selvanathan to make similarly outspoken expressions of support for her grasp of economics. The Selvanathans were to eat their words however, for after they invested hundreds of millions of rupees in the booming beer industry, Kumaratunga arbitrarily and without warning jacked up excise duty once more, leading to an unprecedented slump: so much for her rhetoric on the benefits of soft alcohol. The brothers Selvanathan have gone all quiet about Kumaratunga's financial prowess since, and no one can think why.

For his part however, Kandiah 'Call me Ken' Balendra remained firmly by Kumaratunga and on his retirement last year, was made chairman of the Bank of Ceylon. No one could have applauded his appointment more than we. Here was a man of proven integrity, a veritable 'Bill Gates' in terms of Sri Lankan business. Above the political fray, 'Call me Ken' seemed to be the messiah everyone had waited for to clean up the mess the bank was in.

No such luck. Since his appointment, Balendra has proved to be as much a stooge as the rest of the cronies and clowns that make up the Kumaratunga establishment. Rather than standing up to political pressure, he has caved right in, allowing himself to become a mere pawn in Kumaratunga's plots to use the state banks to reward her pals.

The best known of Kumaratunga's pals is Ronnie Peiris, who from being an obscure travel agent at the commencement of Kumaratunga's presidency is now a high-flying wheeler dealer with unprecedented influence in and access to President's House. Peiris has been closely associated with several major deals made under suspicious circumstances, including the Katunayake-Colombo Expressway, the notorious Kotte golf links and ABC radio. In 1995, shortly after Kumaratunga rose to the presidency, Peiris obtained a loan of over œ 500,000 (approximately Rs 60 million) from the London branch of the Bank of Ceylon. The loan went into default and earlier this year, the bank's Colombo branch agreed to reschedule it, writing off accrued interest of no less than Rs 15 million. If the circumstances under which Peiris got the loan are shrouded in doubt and mystery, those in which he came to receive a Rs 15 million handout from the bank are even more bizarre still.

Ronnie Peiris owes his success (if indeed making fifteen million bucks on the side at the expense of a state bank is a measure of success) to Chandrika Kumaratunga. He has been the president's houseguest on numerous visits to Sri Lanka. It would be testing the public's credibility too much to claim that the waiver of Rs 15 million on his dues had nothing to do with his relationship with Kumaratunga. Neither is it credible that Balendra was unaware of this. What is more, the devious manner in which Peiris controls his growing empire, through offshore holding companies in the world's more sinister tax havens, was exposed by us just earlier this month. If not in Sri Lanka, where Kumaratunga offers him immunity, this would almost certainly land him in the tax-man's net in the UK, where he resides. Full details of Peiris's deals are already on its way to the UK's tax office, and a formal complaint to the Bribery Commission is due to be made shortly.

Banks have proved to be the undoing of greater people than Peiris. Just last week we exposed a multimillion-rupee bank account that the JVP's Wimal Weerawansha had been maintaining in the People's Bank, and more details are given elsewhere in today's issue. Although Weerawansha and the JVP claim that this is a party account, the fact is that the JVP has not to our knowledge disclosed this account in its income tax returns. What is more, the account is in the name of Weerawansha and his buddy, Ferdinands. Each time a politician is caught with a secret personal bank account, which he has not disclosed as required by law, he cannot claim that it is in fact an account he is maintaining for his party. In that case the account should be in the name of the party and it should be disclosed to the Inland Revenue Department in the annual returns.

The JVP's answer to the serious evidence against Weerawansha has been a challenge to The Sunday Leader to publish details of Susanthika Jayasinghe's allegations regarding S. B. Dissanayake. This is hardly the issue. We did publish what Jayasinghe had to say at the time she said it, and it is no longer news. If indeed the JVP wants us to delve into history, why not go back a little further and publish the gory details of the JVP's own campaign of terror, extortion and bank robberies? Of the hundreds of innocent people gunned down and decapitated? Of the enormous wealth that its leader, Rohan Wijeweera, illegally amassed?

The JVP has been at the forefront of demanding that political patronage to those who have defaulted on loans from state banks should be exposed, as should the defaulting borrowers. Well, the full details of the staggering Rs 15 million waiver to Ronnie Peiris was published by us three weeks ago. What we would like to know is, why is the JVP maintaining a deafening silence on this issue? Why has it gone all shy on the sacred Peiris? Is it that it is so much hand in glove with Kumaratunga that it cannot bring itself to castigate her principal crony?

That is what Wimal Weerawansha, Chandrika Kumaratunga and 'Call me Ken' Balendra all have in common: they are part of the disease that has become an epidemic in the People's Alliance. It is time they were all rooted out and shown up to be what they are: a bunch of cynical hypocrites.