Angered
by an increasingly evident tendency by government not to answer
embarrassing parliamentary questions, the UNP yesterday accused
the government of ducking such questions by asking for
unreasonably long time periods to provide the answers.
"This has become a despicable practice," former
Speaker Joseph Michael Perera told The Sunday Island. A
case in point was the government’s refusal to reveal the
whereabouts of three luxury Prado SUVs (Sports Utility Vehicles)
belonging to the Bank of Ceylon.
Perera said this question was raised by him
three months ago. "Now they want another month to answer it," he
said.
He had asked Prime Minister Ratnasiri
Wickremanayake who holds the portfolio of Internal
Administration whether he was aware that three vehicles bearing
registration numbers 65-1986, 65-1990, 65-1988 belonging to Bank
of Ceylon were missing for some time.
Perera said that he wanted to know whether the
bank had lodged a complaint with police and action taken to
recover the vehicles.
The Gampaha District MP said this wasn’t an
isolated case. A large number of vehicles belonging to various
government institutions were missing, but the government was
reluctant to act.
He urged the ruling coalition to take meaningful
steps to fight waste, corruption and irregularities in the
public sector and challenged the government to make an effort to
locate the missing vehicles and take punitive action against
those found guilty of misappropriating public property.
Fielding questions, he said the government had
absolutely failed to tackle corruption. "Ministers have given a
lot of empty promises," he said, claiming that the Rajapaksa
administration claim of clean government had become a joke in
the eyes of the people.
Perera said that the vehicles were believed to
have been taken away by the Finance Ministry.
He said that the people have a right to know the
identity of officials who had been given these vehicles at the
time of their removal and whether they had informed the
Transport Section of the bank of this matter.
