Bond Commission Report: Party leaders to decide on Jan.22

A party leaders meeting will be convened on January 22 to decide what action needs to be taken on the Bond Commission and the PRECIFAC reports handed over to the Parliament Secretary General by the Presidential Secretariat today, Speaker Karu Jayasuriya said.

He told a news conference today that Parliament had received 26 copies of the Bond Commission report and copies of the 34 reports of the Presidential Commission of Inquiry to Investigate and Inquire into Serious Acts of Fraud, Corruption and Abuse of Power, State Resources and Privileges (PRECIFAC).

The Speaker said they had received only English copies of the report and had requested the Presidential Secretariat to provide them with Sinhala and Tamil translations as soon as possible.

“According to Standing Orders, Copies in all three languages should be given to MPs. The Presidential Secretariat has decided to hand over the reports to the Official Languages Department for translations. We do not know how long it will take for the process as it contains more than 10,000 pages. We will at least try to copy the report into a Compact Disk (CD),” he said.

The Speaker said they had requested 300 copies of the Bond Commission report to be distributed among the relevant parties such as the media and other authorities.

He said the date for the debate on the report and future action would be decided at the party leaders meeting on January 22. (Ajith Siriwardana)