Sri Lanka to sack officer over ‘false’ GDP data row

January 24, 2014 Leave a comment

Sri Lanka to sack officer over ‘false’ GDP data row
Wednesday, January 22, 2014 – 19:21
AFP
COLOMBO – Sri Lanka’s main statistics office Wednesday said a senior official who denounced alleged government pressure to inflate economic growth data would be sacked after he was found guilty of leaking confidential information.
Accounts Director H.S. Wanasinghe faced two separate disciplinary hearings after he complained to the Asian Development Bank (ADB) and an opposition lawmaker that the government was manipulating data.
“We have recommended to the PSC (Public Service Commission) to sack him and it will be done soon,” Census and Statistics chief D.C.A. Gunawardena told reporters in Colombo.
Wanasinghe alleged that he was ordered to increase GDP growth rate for the first quarter of 2013 to 6.0 percent when his calculation showed it was only 5.4 percent.
Sri Lanka’s main opposition last month read out a statement by Wanasinghe narrating how he was under instructions to change national accounts to suit the government, an allegation which the authorities deny.
The anti-corruption watchdog Transparency International (TI) said the senior officer should be treated as a “whistle-blower” and be protected instead of being sacked.
“What we see is a systematic approach of a cover up rather than an investigation into what he has revealed,” TI Sri Lanka chairman J.C. Weliamuna told AFP. “Sacking a senior officer for raising this issue is completely unacceptable.”
Statistics chief Gunawardena denied that he was under pressure to change economic data to suit the government which relies heavily on foreign borrowings.
“It is a funny joke,” he said of the allegations. “People can talk about any rubbish, but the department of Census and Statistics has no political agenda.”
President Mahinda Rajapakse, who is also the finance minister, told parliament in November that he expected the economy to grow 7.5-8.0 percent in calendar 2014, up from a provisional 7.2 percent in 2013 and 6.4 percent in 2012.
The economy recorded 8.0 percent-plus growth for two straight years after the end of Sri Lanka’s decades-long civil war which saw troops crush separatist Tamil Tiger rebels in 2009.
UN human rights chief Navi Pillay said in August last year after a visit to Sri Lanka that the country under Rajapakse “is showing signs of heading in an increasingly authoritarian direction.”

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Kee Koon Boon (“KB”) is the co-founder and director of HERO Investment Management which provides specialized fund management and investment advisory services to the ARCHEA Asia HERO Innovators Fund (www.heroinnovator.com), the only Asian SMID-cap tech-focused fund in the industry. KB is an internationally featured investor rooted in the principles of value investing for over a decade as a fund manager and analyst in the Asian capital markets who started his career at a boutique hedge fund in Singapore where he was with the firm since 2002 and was also part of the core investment committee in significantly outperforming the index in the 10-year-plus-old flagship Asian fund. He was also the portfolio manager for Asia-Pacific equities at Korea’s largest mutual fund company. Prior to setting up the H.E.R.O. Innovators Fund, KB was the Chief Investment Officer & CEO of a Singapore Registered Fund Management Company (RFMC) where he is responsible for listed Asian equity investments. KB had taught accounting at the Singapore Management University (SMU) as a faculty member and also pioneered the 15-week course on Accounting Fraud in Asia as an official module at SMU. KB remains grateful and honored to be invited by Singapore’s financial regulator Monetary Authority of Singapore (MAS) to present to their top management team about implementing a world’s first fact-based forward-looking fraud detection framework to bring about benefits for the capital markets in Singapore and for the public and investment community. KB also served the community in sharing his insights in writing articles about value investing and corporate governance in the media that include Business Times, Straits Times, Jakarta Post, Manual of Ideas, Investopedia, TedXWallStreet. He had also presented in top investment, banking and finance conferences in America, Italy, Sydney, Cape Town, HK, China. He has trained CEOs, entrepreneurs, CFOs, management executives in business strategy & business model innovation in Singapore, HK and China.

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