CoPF member wants Central Bank, 13 commercial banks to be held to account

Colombo, June 30 (Daily Mirror) - New Democratic Front (NDF) MP who is a member of Committee on Finance (COPF) Ravi Karunanayake in a letter addressed to the Chairman of COPF Harsha de Silva urged him to hold the Central Bank Supervision Unit and its Financial Investigation Unit answerable for what he called lethargic and oversight blindness of the institution with regard to the billion dollar illegal transfer of funds which was revealed by President Anura Kumara Dissanayake last week.

Mr Karunanayake had also requested the CoPF chief to ask 13 commercial banks to justify their alleged internal control failures and address the movement of complicit bank managers.

He has asked the CoPF Chief to get the Controller General of Imports and Exports and the Director General of Customs to detail as to why data silos were allowed to persist, preventing real-time verification of physical imports against outgoing banking remittances

“Given the magnitude of this multi-billion-rupee crime, we must issue an immediate, formal and stern request to the said institutions to appear before COPF, backed by the mandate to produce answers to the probable questioning that will take place.

“The execution of over 26,108 fraudulent telegraphic transactions routed through 227 bank accounts across 13 commercial banks represents a systematic regulatory collapse. The bank supervision unit and the financial intelligence unit of CB possess sweeping statutory powers to audit, monitor, and track macro-financial flows. It is structurally impossible for Rs 340 billion to leave our banking system over a two-year period without triggering automated off-site surveillance alerts or cross-border transaction thresholds. The fact that 105 shell operations successfully exploited proxy accounts opened in the names of 36 low-income individuals points to a total failure or active internal subversion of Know Your Customer (KYC) and Anti-Money Laundering protocols,” he said in the letter.

“If COPF fails to take an uncompromising, aggressive stance on the matter, we will be failing our duty to oversee public finance. We cannot permit a crisis of this magnitude to be swept under the rug or treated as a mere administrative oversight. The public demands that accountability begin with the state institutions entrusted with financial oversight. Sri Lanka does not need more post-facto investigations after the damage is done; it needs robust governance led by capable technocrats,” he also said.