8 October 2021 08:54 am
By Ajith Siriwardana and Yohan Perera
The Government is attempting to sweep under the carpet, the incident where former parliamentarian Nirupama Rajapaksa and her husband Thirukumar Nadesan have been listed in the Pandora Papers,The Opposition yesterday alleged.
“ The Govt. is claiming that the incident had not taken place before 1994 and not during the Rajapaksa Government, “ it said.
SJB MP S.M. Marikkara told Parliament that the Government was attempting to hoodwink the people by appointing a commission and to rule out that the incident cannot be investigated as it had taken place before 1994 prior to the enactment of the Money Laundering Act in 2006.
The MP said Nadesan was only an employee of a famous Company in 1995 and that his wife Nirupama Rajapaksa became a minister in 1994.
“Nadesan was arrested in 2015 after the Yahapalana Government came to power over the Malwana mansion. The investigations revealed that US$. 2.4 million had been transferred to his account in a private bank in Cinnamon Gardens from the Red Ruth Investment from Hongkong between December 14, 2010 and November 11, 2014. Some US$ 1.3 million had been transferred to one of his other accounts between January 22, 2014 to November 13, 2015.Accordingly, a total of more US$ 3.7 million had been transferred to his account in Sri Lanka,” he said.
The MP also said that investigations further revealed that this money had been received from the China National Machinery and China CAMC Engineering Co., Ltd. when Nirupama Rajapaksa was a Minister of the Rajapaksa Government.
He also said that further investigations conducted to ascertain why this money had been transferred from those two Chinese Companies, had revealed that Rs. 4.1 billion had been paid to these two companies through the controversial Gin-Nilwala Diversion project. “Rs. 1 billion had been transferred to those two Companies on December 24,2014 and Rs. 2.9 billion on January 1,2015 and another Rs. one billion on January 6, 2015,” he said.
The MP said this black money might have been laundered by now, using the Money Laundering Act introduced by this Government.
He said they had more details and said that they would reveal them in the days to come.