Monday 22nd April, 2024

A woman has recently been arrested in Brazil for taking a 68-year-old man, who had been dead for hours, to a bank in Rio de Janeiro to obtain a loan. She pretended that the dead man, whom she kept calling uncle, was seriously ill, but wanted a loan, according to media reports. Thankfully, she could not dupe the bank employees, who alerted the police.

Perhaps, what the Brazilian woman is reported to have done in a bid to draw a loan pales into insignificance in comparison to how Sri Lankan politicians obtain loans, parts of which end up in their deep pockets. Even if she had succeeded in her endeavour, her racket would not have affected the borrower, who was dead. Our political leaders have no history of taking corpses to banks, but they do something worse; they obtain massive loans at the expense of the unborn. It is the future generations that will have to pay back the loans to the tune of billions of dollars the present-day leaders have been drawing recklessly over the past several decades. Debt restructuring will make the burden on future generations even worse.

What had caused the death of the man who was taken to the Brazilian bank posthumously was not known at the time of writing. In this country, banks and loan sharks, including the so-called microfinance companies, cause the deaths of some of their customers, who lose all their assets when they fail to pay back loans at exorbitantly high interest rates.

The microfinance creditors do not give up their efforts to recover loans even after their borrowers commit suicide. They demand monthly interest payments from the families of the victims of predatory loans. Instances abound where the hapless borrowers lose their valuable assets, such as houses, vehicles and even land, pledged as collaterals for loans and are reduced to penury and/or left with no alternative but to take their own lives. Sri Lankans are not alone in this predicament. Their counterparts in other developing countries are also preyed on by loan predators, who operate with impunity because they have huge slush funds, and politicians benefit from the largesse.

The aforesaid Brazilian woman is facing legal action, we are told. But our politicians who are borrowing heavily at the expense of the unborn, and the loan sharks who drive their borrowers to suicide are going places. What a world!

It’s pricing formulae, stupid

The Trade Ministry has reportedly decided to introduce a pricing formula for building materials as part of a strategy to give a boost to the construction industry, which is in crisis. This may look like a sensible move on the face of it, but the question is whether the Trade Ministry will be able to achieve its goal. It has failed to accomplish even a simple task like regulating egg prices, which have gone into the stratosphere. Minister of Trade Nalin Fernando has been bellowing rhetoric and issuing warnings and even threats in a bid to rein in the errant egg traders, but in vain.

The public has lost faith in pricing formulae. Last month, this newspaper quoted Chairman of the Committee on Public Finance, Dr. Harsha de Silva, as having said that the Trade Ministry had disregarded the milk food pricing formula much to the detriment of consumers’ interests.

SJB MP and former Minister of Power and Energy Champika Ranawaka has reportedly said the government is making unconscionable profits by keeping fuel prices artificially high. If so, the foreign companies in the fuel retail trade must also be making a killing.

One can only hope that Ranawaka will work out the actual fuel prices and reveal them to the public soon. The government must be manipulating the pricing formula to jack up fuel prices. This is something the Opposition must take up in Parliament and ratchet up pressure on the government to explain. If the price of diesel can be reduced significantly, the cost of transport and power generation will decrease much to the benefit of the general public and the industrial sector.