10th Parliament· 154 sittings on record · 30,475 speeches · latest 10 June 2026

Hon. (Dr.) Harsha de Silva

Samagi Jana Balawegaya· Colombo· 4 March 2025 ·Procedural: Ministerial Statement: Online Safety Act and tax on export services

Public Finance
AI summary generated by gpt-5.5

Hon. (Dr.) Harsha de Silva urged the Ministry of Finance to act on recommendations made by the Committee on Public Finance regarding online casinos. He said he had raised the issue under both the current and previous Governments, disputed claims that no online casinos operate, and warned that such operations may be generating very large daily revenues similar to offline casinos.

Verbatim record (translated)

Machine-translated from Sinhala / Tamil / English

¶ 01 Hon. Deputy Minister, thank you. As Chairman of the Committee on Public Finance too, I raise this. I have raised it not only today but since the previous Government. They then said “there are no online casinos.” But there are. Like offline casinos, online operations may be making millions — even billions — a day. Through the Committee on Public Finance we have made many recommendations to the Ministry of Finance. Please implement them urgently.

Provenance

Source
Hansard, Tuesday, 4 March 2025 ·No. 1742359468086980 ·English daily/uncorrected Hansard
Page · column
not yet extracted — page/column anchors are not in the current dataset; the source PDF is the citable location.
Permalink
/lk/speeches/10251

Cite as: Hon. (Dr.) Harsha de Silva. 10th Parliament, Parliament of Sri Lanka. Hansard, 4 March 2025. No. 1742359468086980. Politick, https://staging.politick.io/lk/speeches/10251