The Hon. (Dr.) Nalinda Jayatissa - Minister of Health and Mass Media and Chief Government Whip
The Minister distinguished between two stages in issuing bar licences: selecting prospective applicants and processing submitted applications under existing regulations. He said the Treasury Secretary’s statement to court related only to the legality of the second-stage administrative processing, while the Government’s concern is the initial selection of applicants. He stated that this selection process remains under scrutiny and further details would be disclosed later.
Verbatim record (translated)
Machine-translated from Sinhala / Tamil / English¶ 01 Madam Presiding Member, I will respond to one point on bar licences. There are two stages. First, selection of applicants—who is chosen to be invited to apply. Second, once an application is received, officials process it per regulations: deposits, completeness, distance rules, etc. The Treasury Secretary’s statement to court pertains to the second stage—that once applications were in, officials acted lawfully. Our concern is the first stage: how those applicants were selected in the first place. That selection process remains under scrutiny, and matters will be revealed in due course.
Provenance
- Source
- Hansard, Saturday, 15 November 2025 ·No. 22870 ·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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Cite as: The Hon. (Dr.) Nalinda Jayatissa - Minister of Health and Mass Media and Chief Government Whip. 10th Parliament, Parliament of Sri Lanka. Hansard, 15 November 2025. No. 22870. Politick, https://staging.politick.io/lk/speeches/29069