Sri Lanka: Juggling, dropping, catching, “balls”
By P. Shanthikumar
Asantha de Mel, who is very good at stopping one ball, was given more balls to juggle with as CPC Chairman. Kept dropping the other two balls, only manage to catch one ball at a time. The foreign bankers as Standard Chartered, Citigroup cleverly flogged the poor cricketer who is only a novice at juggling more than one ball a hedging contract with an open-ended downside risk
Not only that the bankers covered themselves on both sides with ‘stop loss’ and thereby protecting themselves from open-ended risks. The greedy deceitful vultures also ensured CPC bought double the amount of fuel when the prices fall – butter side up always for the bankers – on the open-ended side of the risk. Interestingly no premium had to be paid with zero-collar-hedging (Nice name, shame about the breath!). All that remains, I hope the SC would penalise the directors of the banks for deliberate and premeditated deception of a novice by selling open-ended risks and raking in unconscionable profits, and also have them pilloried at Bogambara with more fanfare than that was accorded to the fall of Pooneryn.
Chandrika Bandaranayaka Kumaratunga who is more adept at juggling more balls than one at a time is reputed to have come up with a devolution proposal that is the best so far. Then she turns around and vilifies the Tamils as being recent arrivals, forgetting her forebears who were Tamils from South India arrived much recently and even made it to be aristocrats in the island. Such vilification destroys community relations and hammers the Tamils into being second-class citizens. This is what I mean when I say the Sinhala Political Establishment haven’t a clue as to why the country is burning even after sixty years of independence and twenty-five years of civil war. The packages come complete with creeping genocide and colonisation as a minimum. Her package has greater open-ended downside risk than that was flogged to Asantha de Mel – the size of Bay of Bengal, to be precise!
The Indian parippu drop has made racists amongst Sinhalese green with envy. So they decide to send food items to the military in the north. That is fine and there nothing wrong with that. But to use Tamil IDPs as cover is to really stoop very low indeed. I wish they wouldn’t do that. This really is adding insult to injury. Look at the people who are involved in it. These are the worst of the Deshapremis in the entire island. I wouldn’t mention names, in order not to offend one person who is showing signs of repentance. Other than that, these are a collection of Manel Mal movement, naffers, hookers, and saffron-clad gigolos, Casanovas, bisexuals, and of course Rasputins, who in their spare time would ransack the national coffers and admonish the real Sinhala-Buddhists who are ordinary masses to starve and not to ‘ask for more’.
There was a cheap attempt on the day of the Great Heroes Day, to spread a rumour that Kilinochchi had been overrun by the Sri Lankan Army. A week later Kilinochchi remains is Tiger hands. I wish people would not succumb to such cheap propaganda. The turnout at Excel Centre in London was well in excess of 30,000 and probably closer to 40,000 as claimed by the Tamilnet. There was euphoria all around when Prabaharan’s live broadcast was heard on time. He made a defiant and uplifting speech encouraged mainly by the restoration of friendship and goodwill from India and Tamil Nadu in particular. He promised to continue the struggle and wake Rajapaksa from his reverie of conquering the Tamil homeland. But, at the same time promised to sue for peace and expressed his willingness to enter into an unconditional ceasefire agreement government at the earliest possible opportunity.
Following Saturday, DBS Jeyaraj produced a detailed account, in the Daily Mirror, of how the GHD was very successfully commemorated in east even under most trying conditions. The Sinhala racists have attempted to bury the runaway success of the GHD under the very unfortunate events that took place in Mumbai, but to no avail. Notwithstanding that, I would accept ordinary Sinhalese venting a bit of their feelings, if need be, so as to clear the air and move on!!!
6 Comments
Well said. I consider that the Tamils have made all possible peaceful means for over twenty years, but failed.
The Sinhala politicians have been playing up for so long - the tamils will get nothing from the politicians, but gradually decimate them.
The only option is LTTE!
Well as far as Asantha De Mel is concerned, he is only a convenient pawn.
Who was at the helm of the deal and in return for what, is more than obvious and nobody wants to talk about it!
Bravo Ranil! Aren’t you increasingly coming under public microscope for you weak leadership? Why don’t you take a lesson from Thailand?
Typical of the mind set of expatriate continuity's. Nothing worthwhile to add to the public discourse except sit in the sidelines and do brilliant financially reporting such as this.
Perhaps now that you have poked fun of the Sri Lankan ministers and public servants for completely dropping the ball on the financial front, you can turn your radar to the the Americans including the head of the Federal Reserve and do a similar brilliant story about how they dropped the ball, this time add a few zero's because those MIT & Yale PHD's have written off several trillion !
It is abundantly clear that Sri Lankan politicians, perhaps more so than in other countries, are only concerned about coming into power and staying there. They will even deal with the devil to achieve these purposes.
The mistake made by the Tamils was not to join one or the other of these parties and to join forces when it came to common issues. The two parties - UNP and SLFP - would be falling over each other to give concessions to tamils to get their vote. They could have then got the autonomy they wanted (and even more) without any of the bloodletting
Gamini, it is not my intention to offend anybody, least of all decent people like you. But, in today's Sri Lanka if you take an issue with the government, ministers would come out and aknowledge the issue, would promise to investigate and correct it but carry on as normal without ever producing any correction or reporting on follow up.
When Minister Fowzie said that he did not expect the oil prices to fall, as reported in today's The Isalnd, he was lying through his teeth: why hedge in the first place if he did not expect the prices to fall; why double the volume of purchase on the open-ended down side? You see, CJ Silva could smell a crook and a liar a mile and a half away. That is why he made the recommendation to the President that Fowzie be sacked. It is in the country's interest that President Rajapaksa gives just that a tiny bit of lattitude to the SC especially given that he hadn't sacked Fowzie so far.
The SC also did a brilliant job seeing Dr. PB Jayasundara out of Treasury. I have a feeling Govenor Cabraal too would end up in the dock before CJ Silva in the not too distant future for his unorthodox financial wizardry. There is also a need to impress upon the powers that be not to insult the intelligence of the ordinary masses. But, then the powers that be have the lethargy of the ordinary masses working in their favour.
As for poking fun at Sri Lankan Ministers, I can't believe the audacity with which Minister Ranawaka and his ilk asked the ordinary masses to starve, while they pocketed all sorts allowances over and above the fat salaries: How many thousands of children do you think are saying: "Please Mr. Ranawaka, I want more!" Quite frankly it is a bit too much to stomach.
Anyway, I am ever so grateful for your feedback!!!
Appreciate your response,
I am not offended at all, I just make the point that Hind sight is a great thing, at $147/bbl oil the hedges would have been deeply in the money, now that its sub $50/bbl it looks like positive lunacy
similarly I'm sure given the 'person Non-Gratia' status of the tigers world wide the sun god would have thought twice about killing Mr Ghandi, but hey no one has 20/20 vision.
Also given your assertion here that Kumaratunga has strong Tamil lineage is it fair to say that a major sticking point RE never having a Tamil in position of power will now fall off the hate posters and vilification campaigns, as you point out we have had a number of Tamil presidents in Sri Lanka.