Swindler’s List

Tuesday 11th October, 2022

Never a dull day in Sri Lanka! Controversies crop up at such a pace that the people even forget their hunger, and lap up media reports on scandals. The Lotus Tower has lost its magic, and all eyes have turned to the World Trade Centre (WTC) towers, Colombo 01.

A female finagler, who had a posh office at the WTC, has got into hot water for diddling a large number of her clients out of huge amounts of money. She has been arrested and remanded. She hobnobbed with the super rich and the famous, and thereby succeeded in camouflaging her flimflam, which proved quite effective. Among her customers are said to be many moneybags such as business tycoons, powerful politicians, and popular artistes. It is said that some of them have chosen to remain silent because they allegedly took their business relationships with the bilker a bit too far at a personal level, and are therefore wary of opening a can of worms by going public. Only a handful of them have lodged complaints with the CID.

When shaky finance companies such as Golden Key and Sakvithi went belly up, thousands of depositors took to the streets demanding their money back. They are still fighting. Strangely, in the case of the latest scam, there has been no such outcry, and some aggrieved depositors are even claiming that they haven’t lost anything and had nothing to do with the company concerned! For them, there is much more at stake than their money.

This is not the first time some wealthy men have fallen for the wiles of a female confidence trickster and lost their money, in this country. There have been many media reports of such scams over the past so many years, but the latest one has eclipsed others because of the culprit’s social status and political connections. Some fat cats reportedly ‘invested’ millions of rupees in her venture, no questions asked. Such was their faith in her. It may be recalled that even Mark Antony, a Roman triumvir, lost all his worldly possessions and his dear life because he fell head over heels in love with a woman; Cleopatra twisted the battle-hardened General around her little finger, according to historians.

Now that the aforementioned female fraudster has been made to languish in remand prison for having finagled her customers out of fortunes, the question is why the same treatment has not been meted out to the politicians and officials responsible for bankrupting the country. Having borrowed recklessly, stolen public funds, put through various crooked deals at the expense of the state coffers, totally mismanaged the economy and bankrupted the country, they had the chutzpah to tell the lenders that they could not pay back loans! One sees no difference between what they have done and the actions of the female chiseller in a spot.

There is reason to believe that the female swindler has been discriminated against; her male counterparts who cheated as many as 22 million people of billions of dollars by promising them the moon have got away with it for all practical purposes. She no doubt has to be made to pay for her sins, but the perpetrators of economic crimes against the nation must not be allowed to get off scot-free. Otherwise, one would be compelled to say a la Mr. Bumble in Oliver Twist that the law is an ass—an idiot.

Meanwhile, it is alleged that an influential politician is trying to scuttle the ongoing probe into the aforesaid scam and take the female swindler off the hook. His despicable efforts must be frustrated at any cost and the investigation kept on track. Similarly, another probe must be launched anent those on the swindler’s list; they must be made to reveal how they raised the funds they have lost. Some of them may have been using the rogue company to launder money, and the possibility of anti-social elements such as drug dealers being among them cannot be ruled out. Let the focus of the investigations be on this aspect of the issue as well.