New 4-year development strategy to be announced soon by govt.
Several new bills pertaining to the economy and the Monetary Act will soon be tabled in Parliament for approval.
The Sri Lankan Exchange Control Act which is draconian in nature will not be amended but will be totally repealed. “In the next few weeks we will bring necessary controls to the Monetary Act and to the Banking Act,” said the Minister of Finance Ravi Karunanayake delivering the Certified Management Accountants (CMA) Founders Day Oration held at the HNB Tower in Colombo last week.
“Why do we want to do this? It is because we want to keep abreast with other countries. Today there are investments of around 500-600 million dollars coming into the country. The Prime Minister will soon bring in 15- 20 new Acts of Parliament.”
The Minister further said that one may wonder as to why there are no major projects getting off the ground not knowing that there are 83 such projects in the pipeline. While not much noise has not been made of such projects the impact will be seen in a couple of months’ time when the President and the Prime Minister in the next two weeks spell out the 4-year strategy of the government from a national perspective.
“Today we live in a fast changing world and corporate planning that was done 15-20 years ago is not relevant today. We want to digitalise the economy and the Asian Development Bank (ADB) was help- ful in financing us from economic collapse. All government institutions will be digitalised,” he said.
President of the Institute of Certified Management Accountants, Prof. Lakshman R. Watawala in his welcome address said that this body was incorporated in April 2009 as the National Professional Management Accounting Institution.
”Today 694 students have passed the examination and we have 15000 students .The Central Bank of Sri Lanka was the first government institution to recognize our qualification for recruitment. However we are at loss to understand that despite the cabinet approval to recognise the CMA qualification it is not implemented when it comes to recruitment for government jobs,” he said.