By Faraz Shauketaly
As Sri
Lanka continues to pay huge amounts in interest due to
having to borrow money for its development work, the
chief culprit in the massive VAT scam Kamil Kuthubdeen
and his consort, Hamza, are living it up in
Dubai,
the glittering Gulf emirate. This is the man on the run
from Sri Lanka in connection with the VAT fraud. His
consort is none other than Hamza, the one time private
secretary to Imtiaz Bakeer Markar, former Minister of
Mass Communication under the Ranil Wickremesinghe
administration.
Kamil
Kuthubdeen and his band of thieves, defrauded the Sri
Lanka government of a staggering Rs. 8 billion — or so
it is reliably estimated and reported. Yet, they roam
the world, in search of opportunities that will sustain
their ill-gotten wealth. Some sources allege their
tentacles stretch to overt money laundering. Recently
they withdrew from a transaction in
Africa when it became apparent that the
Togo
businessmen were trying to pull a scam on Kuthubdeen.
Kamil
Kuthubdeen is said to be in control of not one but two
hotels in Dubai. The Grand Moov and the K-Port Inn are
operated by Global Business Trust LLC, a UAE company
said to be controlled by Kamil Kuthubdeen.
Passport expired
It is
of the most significant interest that Kamil Kuthubdeen’s
Sri Lankan passport has now officially expired. Yet we
have reports that Kuthubdeen has recently travelled out
of the UAE to Togo and Hong Kong.
In
this context we asked our sources at the Immigration
Department to confirm the status. They confirmed that
the passport that has been issued, is now out of date
and records in
Colombo
do not indicate that the passport has been renewed.
We
posed the question whether it was possible for the
Embassy in the UAE or Dubai to extend the validity
without informing
Colombo. The response was “all possibilities exist.” It is not the
proper method of course, but a ‘possibility.’
The
irony of this is not lost on us: here is a man on the
run from the law in Sri Lanka yet a Sri Lanka mission in
the area, may have surreptitiously extended his
passport. What they ought to have done is to have
cancelled his passport and issued him an emergency
travel document valid for a one-way direct flight to
Colombo only.
Exited Sri Lanka
Popular folklore has it that Kuthubdeen exited Sri Lanka
by paying for a boat to take him to
India,
then on to Oman before ending up “home” in Dubai. Hamza
on the other hand is said to have made his exit with a
bit more panache: his exit was facilitated via
Katunayake.
Kuthubdeen is fond of saying that he has “sorted” the
VAT troubles. It can be sorted if he returns to this
country and answers questions about a fraud that
investigators say he is the king pin. The bulk of the
money was stolen from the republic through nothing
cleverer than a straightforward fraud.
One
did not need to be an “astute” businessman — this was
pure and simply fraud. With the cohorts who are behind
bars now the perpetrators connived and perpetrated a
massive fraud on the republic.
One of
the con-team, was reported to have visited Australia no
less than 14 times in a single year! He was no
businessman either: he was a senior official at the VAT
department — signifying he was a public official who
stuck two fingers up at Article 28 (D) of the
Constitution of his employer — the State of Sri Lanka.
“Shocked conscience”
If the
Supreme Court no less suffered from a “shocked
conscience” by the actions of P.B. Jayasundera, the
disgraced former Treasury Secretary, then we can only
begin to speculate what a Judge would have to say about
the VAT fraudsters. Some of the suspects have been in
prison for nearly two and a half years — they will
probably be sentenced to far greater time once the trial
is concluded and rightly so, as a day less, is to be
lenient in the extreme.
Kamil
Kuthubdeen wormed his way into prominence thanks to his
wife’s connection to Imtiaz Bakeer Markar, who was the
Minister of Mass Communications at the time. By the time
Kuthubdeen was “done” he left behind a wake of disasters
which affected both family, friends and so-called
partners.
As
Kuthubdeen celebrated his birthday, away from the
Colombo Remand Prison, in the glitzy capital of the
Gulf, Dubai, at a hotel he is thought to control (The
Grand Moov), the analogy that President Mahinda
Rajapakse drew at a cabinet meeting nearly three years
ago is difficult to cast aside: that with the money that
was plundered from the state, the Hambantota Port could
have been paid for.
We
wonder if the President knows of the role that his
Treasury Secretary, the disgraced P.B. Jayasundera,
played in the VAT fraud scam. Because if the President
was aware, and especially aware of what his Auditor
General had to say about his Treasury Secretary (he said
his job and his responsibilities were not “discharged
properly”) there is no way that the President would
entertain P.B. Jayasundera within 100 yards of the
Treasury, which to P.B. Jayasundera — knowing our
President is a rugby fan — had become the touchline.
(faraz@thesundayleader.lk)
