Thursday’s meeting which the country’s garment export sector had with treasury secretary Charitha Ratwatte and deputy treasury secretary Faisz Mohideen with regard to the impact that the new import levy of 0.75% would have on the industry ended with no decisions being made, other than the treasury officials requesting the industry to give them a feedback as to what sort of impact the previous 0.05% levy had on the industry’s bottomline last year, said garment industrialist and former chairman of the Exporters Association Lyn Fernando, who was one of the representatives present at this meeting. ‘Apart from the new levy, matters have now been made much worse with the recent 40% electricity hikes as well as the fuel hikes,’ said Fernando. Already, 150 of the country’s 859 garment factories have closed down, throwing thousands out of employment, he said.

‘The biggest being the Tri Star Group, with around seven of their factories being temporarily closed-down, throwing out around 3,500 from employment, while the majority of the other factories that have been shut-down are those employing under a 100 garment workers,’ he said.

‘We did not expect any hard decisions to be made from these authorities as they seemingly lacked the clout to make decisions at a policy level,’ Fernando, referring to yesterday’s meeting said. He further said that they are in the process of compiling the data as requested by the treasury and hoped to forward it to them yesterday.

The government’s new levy of 0.75%, which came into effect from last month, is 15 times higher than the old levy of 0.05%. Even prior to this new levy, as a result of last year’s worldwide recession, compounded by the July 24 attack on the Katunayake airport and the September 11 attacks in the USA, the country’s garment export earnings declined from US$ 2.98 billion in 2000, to US$ 2.538 billion last year, a decline of over US$ 400 million.

This decline spilt-over to the first quarter of this year as well, with earnings recording a decrease of 17%, from US$ 966.1 million made during the first quarter of last year to US$ 801.8 million made during the first quarter of this year. (PA)