‘Nirupama Rajapaksa can finance an election campaign in Sri Lanka by herself’ – CMEV

Text and picture by PRIYAN DE SILVA

National Coordinator of the Centre for Monitoring Election Violence (CMEV) Manjula Gajanayaka said that if the revelations made in the ‘Pandora Papers’ were correct, former Deputy Minister Nirupama Rajapaksa could finance an election campaign in Sri Lanka by herself and win the election as well.

According to ‘Pandora Papers’ released by the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ) the undeclared wealth of the former Sri Lankan lawmaker and her businessman husband was more than USD 160 million even a decade ago, Gajanayaka said.

The CMEV in its bid to put in place a legal framework to make political parties and candidates disclose the costs they incurred for election campaigning, had set up a Campaign Finance Monitoring Unit in 2019 to keep tabs on how much major political parties and candidates spent at the last Presidential and Parliamentary elections, Gajanayake said.

According to the CMEV estimates, which may be just a fraction of the actual cost, the campaign expenditure at the 2020 Parliamentary Election was Rs 3,601 million of which Rs 1,857 million was spent by the Sri Lanka Podujana Peramuna (SLPP), the winner, while at the 2019 Presidential election the estimated campaign finance was Rs 3,796 million of which Rs 1,826 million was spent by the SLPP. “With the USD fetching over Rs 200 financing an election campaign is well within Nirupama Rajapaksa’s means” Gajanayaka reiterated.