The Hon. Sajith Premadasa - Leader of the Opposition

Samagi Jana Balawegaya· Colombo· 20 March 2025 ·Oral question: Oral Question by Private Notice: Withholding Tax on Senior Citizens' Deposits and Valaichchenai Paper Factory

Parliamentary Procedure

AI summary generated by gpt-5.5

Sajith Premadasa sought clarification on a ministerial response regarding a tax increase from 5 to 10 percent. He argued that tax efficiency is achieved through improved mechanisms within the tax system, not by raising tax rates, and requested the Minister to acknowledge and correct the statement.

Verbatim record (translated)

Machine-translated from Sinhala / Tamil / English

¶ 01 Previously, others were also given opportunities to seek clarifications. I kindly request that I be allowed a clarification.

¶ 02 In your answer, you stated that the increase from 5 to 10 percent is to improve tax efficiency. Tax efficiency is not improved by raising rates, Hon. Minister. It is improved by adopting efficient mechanisms within the tax structure. Not by raising taxes. I kindly request you to acknowledge that and correct it.

Provenance

Source: Hansard, Thursday, 20 March 2025 ·No. 1746596381071973 ·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/24038

View source PDF ↗ Suggest a correction

Cite as: The Hon. Sajith Premadasa - Leader of the Opposition. 10th Parliament, Parliament of Sri Lanka. Hansard, 20 March 2025. No. 1746596381071973. Politick, https://staging.politick.io/lk/speeches/24038