The Hon. S.M. Marikkar
Hon. S.M. Marikkar questioned the Minister on procurement decisions allegedly made by the Prime Minister or a committee appointed by him, comparing them to earlier Cabinet-delegated actions involving a building for the Ministry of Agriculture. He argued that maintaining scarcity-period prices despite available buffer stocks had caused a fundamental financial loss, and asked whether the Government would investigate the alleged “invisible hand” or “ghost” in the President’s Office and quantify the loss.
Verbatim record (translated)
Machine-translated from Sinhala / Tamil / English¶ 01 My second supplementary is this, Hon. Minister. Even if you act under powers delegated to the Cabinet—like when SOMO was taken and the whole Cabinet claimed a building had been taken for the Ministry of Agriculture—now this is being decided by the Prime Minister or the committee appointed by him. When there is an available buffer, continuing the same price taken during scarcity within procurement has caused a fundamental loss. I also say there was an invisible hand in the President’s Office. In the words of Hon. Ravi Karunanayake, a “ghost.” Will you investigate who this ghost is and quantify the financial loss caused?
Provenance
- Source
- Hansard, Friday, 9 January 2026 ·No. 23149 ·English daily/uncorrected Hansard
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- not yet extracted — page/column anchors are not in the current dataset; the source PDF is the citable location.
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/lk/speeches/1658
Cite as: The Hon. S.M. Marikkar. 10th Parliament, Parliament of Sri Lanka. Hansard, 9 January 2026. No. 23149. Politick, https://staging.politick.io/lk/speeches/1658