The Hon. Bimal Rathnayake
Hon. Bimal Rathnayake argued that the coal procurement issue should be assessed on whether Minister Jayakody had any corrupt intent or plan, noting that corruption or crimes usually leave identifiable evidence. He said the dispute concerned differing coal quality test results between the supplier and the buyer, and that moving to a mutually acceptable laboratory after rejecting the supplier’s proposed lab was a permissible step.
Verbatim record (translated)
Machine-translated from Sinhala / Tamil / English¶ 01 Next, we must see whether within this process Minister Jayakody acted with any corrupt intent or plan. It is easy to lean on Nalinda, but watch the exam! My point, Hon. Speaker: do we see, on examination, any corrupt plan by Minister Jayakody? When we discussed the Easter attacks, we saw masterminds took many corrupt actions toward their aim. Crimes leave traces—calls, concealment, moves. Here, you spoke of a third umpire. This case has a fourth umpire too.
¶ 02 The supplier claims—via its lab or an associated company—that the coal meets quality; we, the buyer, say our lab failed it. The supplier says they do not accept our lab, so let’s go to a mutually acceptable lab. That can be done. What did we do? After their suggested lab was rejected, we could proceed. It is permissible.
Provenance
- Source
- Hansard, Friday, 10 April 2026 ·No. 23479 ·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/6199
Cite as: The Hon. Bimal Rathnayake. 10th Parliament, Parliament of Sri Lanka. Hansard, 10 April 2026. No. 23479. Politick, https://staging.politick.io/lk/speeches/6199