The Hon. Sunil Handunnetti - Minister of Industry and Entrepreneurship Development
The Minister accepted the Member’s concern about the Special Commodity Levy, stating that it is intended to offset some VAT effects but had previously been misused through arbitrary duty changes, citing the sugar duty case. He said the Ministry would consider the issue at the appropriate time. On edible oils, he noted that VAT applies to coconut oil and proposed importing copra pieces for local processing instead of refined RBD oil, citing concerns over consumer protection, health risks, and misleading labelling of imported coconut oil products.
Verbatim record (translated)
Machine-translated from Sinhala / Tamil / English¶ 01 Hon. Member, I accept your point. The SCL is intended to counteract certain VAT impacts. Historically, SCL was often misused for fraud and to favour cronies—cutting sugar duty from Rs. 50/kg to 25 cents and then back again. Now, our Ministry will consider your concern at the appropriate time.
¶ 02 On edible oils: VAT applies to coconut oil. We propose to import copra pieces rather than refined RBD oil, supply them to our mills, and produce domestically. Otherwise, importing RBD coconut oil exposes consumers to aflatoxin risk and carcinogens. Imported bottles often hide “RBD blend” in small print while advertising “pure coconut oil” in large letters. People do not realize RBD is not pure.
Provenance
- Source
- Hansard, Thursday, 9 January 2025 ·No. 1738229262040729 ·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/23707
Cite as: The Hon. Sunil Handunnetti - Minister of Industry and Entrepreneurship Development. 10th Parliament, Parliament of Sri Lanka. Hansard, 9 January 2025. No. 1738229262040729. Politick, https://staging.politick.io/lk/speeches/23707