Saturday 17th February, 2024

Trade unions are on the warpath, demanding pay hikes, and the ordinary people are struggling to keep their heads above water mostly due to unconscionably high tax and tariff hikes. The government insists that such painful measures are necessary to help the country come out of the present economic crisis. But it will be possible to ease the economic burden on the public if action is taken to eliminate corruption and waste in the state sector.

It has now been revealed that corruption, waste and mismanagement in the power and energy sectors have led to huge increases in the prices of electricity and fuel; losses that the Ceylon Electricity Board (CEB) and Ceylon Petroleum Corporation (CPC) suffer are conveniently passed on to the public in the form of prices hikes. The CEB, which has earned massive profits during recent months due to power price hikes and an increase in the hydro power generation, has not effected tariff reductions yet. The Public Utilities Commission of Sri Lanka, which is required to safeguard the interests of the public, is dragging its feet on repeated requests for power tariff decreases.

A forensic audit has blown the lid off frauds at the CPC and the Ceylon Storage Terminals (CPSTL); these state-owned enterprises have incurred staggering losses owing to the alteration and deletion of data related to petroleum stocks. The audit was conducted following a complaint Power and Energy Minister Kanchana Wijesekera lodged with the CID in August 2022.

Auditors yesterday briefed Minister Wijesekera on the major findings of the forensic audit conducted by KPMG on the sales and distribution of petroleum products from the CPSTL. More than 1.3 million data entries have been tampered with since 2010, and most of the alterations and deletions occurred at the height of the fuel crisis in 2022. Interestingly, irregularities decreased drastically after the Minister’s complaint to the CID about losses from stock holding in 2022 amounting to Rs. 28 billion; the losses dropped to Rs. 4 billion in 2023. A high-level probe must be launched forthwith to find out the culprits, who deserve stringent punishment.

The full forensic audit report is scheduled to be handed over to the Minister next week, and he will share it with the Cabinet, Parliament, the Auditor General and the Attorney General’s Department. It is hoped that the government will not delay investigations so that the crooks who manipulated and destroyed the CPC and CPSTL data will be able to cover their tracks. It may be recalled that two terabytes of classified information pertaining to the National Medicines Regulatory Authority were deleted from the Lanka Government Cloud in 2021. This shows the vulnerability of the government data.

The CPC trade unions have revealed that the CPC charges as much as Rs. 50 per litre of petrol/diesel to recover its losses, which are mostly due to corruption, waste and mismanagement. There is reason to believe that the exorbitant fuel prices can be brought down significantly, if the CPC and the CPSTL are rid of waste and corruption. The public must not be made to pay through the nose to enable these corrupt outfits to recover their preventable losses.