PM weighs in with pre-budget visioning; Marapana lashes out at police for serving "new masters"
by Rajan Philips-November 7, 2015,
The onset of the budget season precipitated quite a few seminar showers and media commentaries. They were all timely and critically enlightening. The Finance Minister’s revenue and expenditure estimates and the indicators about the state of the economy are of grave concern to all economy watchers. The Second Reading of the Budget that will unveil the government plans to deal with the budgetary gap is set for Friday, November 16. But on Thursday, November 5, Guy Fawkes Day in England and also the birth day of Felix Dias, Sri Lanka’s most swashbuckling finance minister ever, Prime Minister Ranil Wickremesinghe weighed in with his, or the government’s, vision for the nation’s economy. Some might say the PM stole the thunder out of his Finance Minister’s budget show. Whatever it might be, make no mistake that without any of Felix Dias’s aristocratic bluff or the upstart clumsiness of the Rajapaksas, Mr. Ranil Wickremesinghe is quietly but deliberately leaving his stamp on everything that matters in the state of Sri Lanka at the present time. On everything that is, but the matter of investigating corruption under the previous regime.