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

The Hon. Rohana Bandara

5 December 2024 ·Debate: Debate on Vote on Account for 2025 (continued)

Public FinanceCorruption & Governance Reform
AI summary generated by gpt-5.5

Rohana Bandara said the Opposition would cooperate with efforts to meet public expectations and support changes where necessary. He questioned the Government’s criticism of past Rajapaksa-era concentration of budgetary control, alleging that the current Budget similarly allocates nearly 60 percent among six Ministers and suggesting power is concentrated within a “Pelawatte brothers’ company” associated with the National People’s Power.

Verbatim record (translated)

Machine-translated from Sinhala / Tamil / English

¶ 01 Hon. Deputy Chairperson, please add the time taken when you assumed the Chair.

¶ 02 We will extend our maximum cooperation to realize the people’s dream. If anything is being destroyed, we will help to change it.

¶ 03 You spoke of a Rajapaksa conglomerate and said 60 percent of the Budget went to the Rajapaksa family. But now we see a “Pelawatte brothers’ company.” Is the National People’s Power turning into a brothers’ company in Pelawatte? In this Budget, nearly 60 percent is allocated among six Ministers. We suspect others are merely the corporate board of this brothers’ company—chauffeuring them, dropping them, and picking them up. Is that your duty? Back then you attacked us when we said such things. The control then lay with the Rajapaksas; has it now passed to a Pelawatte brothers’ company?

Provenance

Source
Hansard, Thursday, 5 December 2024 ·No. 1734081038099638 ·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/12617

Cite as: The Hon. Rohana Bandara. 10th Parliament, Parliament of Sri Lanka. Hansard, 5 December 2024. No. 1734081038099638. Politick, https://staging.politick.io/lk/speeches/12617