The Hon. Nishantha Jayaweera - Deputy Minister of Economic Development
On behalf of the Minister of Finance, Planning and Economic Development, the Deputy Minister stated that 4,216 liquor licences are currently issued. He said licence approvals follow the distance requirements from registered schools and places of religious worship set out in Gazette Extraordinary No. 2366/39, Excise Notification 02/2024, and that the recent CA (Writ) 36/2025 judgment confirms this position. He further stated that no licences have been issued in violation of the Excise Notifications, though separate information is not maintained on the internal transparency of issuing application forms.
Verbatim record (translated)
Machine-translated from Sinhala / Tamil / English¶ 01 Question No. 20/2024 – Location of Liquor Shops: Compliance to Court Order
¶ 02 Hon. Speaker, on behalf of the Minister of Finance, Planning and Economic Development:
¶ 03 (a) (i) The number of liquor licences issued at present is 4,216.
¶ 04 (ii) Gazette Extraordinary No. 2366/39 of 12.01.2024 publishes Excise Notification 02/2024, Rule 12 (a) to (e), which clearly specifies minimum distance requirements from registered schools and registered places of religious worship for each licence category. Licences are issued accordingly. The recent judgment in CA (Writ) 36/2025 also confirms this.
¶ 05 (iii) Of the 4,216 licences, none has been issued in violation of the Excise Notifications. Applications are processed and, upon meeting requirements, licences are granted under the regulations with transparency. However, we do not have separate information on the internal transparency of application form issuance; once received, applications are evaluated per procedure.
¶ 06 (b) Does not arise.
Provenance
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- Hansard, Thursday, 8 January 2026 ·No. 23118 ·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. Nishantha Jayaweera - Deputy Minister of Economic Development. 10th Parliament, Parliament of Sri Lanka. Hansard, 8 January 2026. No. 23118. Politick, https://staging.politick.io/lk/speeches/4869