The Hon. Ravi Karunanayake
Hon. Ravi Karunanayake argued that investment and tourism in underdeveloped regions are being constrained by administrative delays and approval bottlenecks. He cautioned that abolishing SVAT should be accompanied by timely VAT refunds, otherwise delayed Inland Revenue refunds would deter investors. He also called for faster BOI and Port City approvals and urged officials to enable initiatives such as night visits to Sigiriya to increase tourism revenue, citing the President’s own concerns about lengthy approvals across multiple institutions.
Verbatim record (translated)
Machine-translated from Sinhala / Tamil / English¶ 01 How do we develop underdeveloped regions? How do we end SVAT? If you must end it, ensure timely VAT refunds; otherwise, investors will not invest as Inland Revenue delays refunds. Despite “one-stop shop” claims, BOI and Port City approvals take years. Please fix bottlenecks.
¶ 02 Daily Mirror of 16 Jan 2025 said “Sigiriya not open for night visits.” We need proactive officials—open such sites for tourism without administrative obstacles. Sigiriya is globally significant; closing after 5.00 p.m. loses revenue. The President himself has said there are “bottlenecks galore” with approvals needed from 82 institutions and single approvals taking 24 months.
Provenance
- Source
- Hansard, Monday, 24 February 2025 ·No. 1741236032093385 ·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/11700
Cite as: The Hon. Ravi Karunanayake. 10th Parliament, Parliament of Sri Lanka. Hansard, 24 February 2025. No. 1741236032093385. Politick, https://staging.politick.io/lk/speeches/11700