‘My duty to protect UNP at COPE’

Sujeewa says nothing unethical in calling Arjun

At the press conference Minister Sujeewa Senasinghe called on Tuesday to explain away the 227 calls to Aloysius, 62 made and received to and from Arjun Aloysius while Sujeewa was on serving on the COPE committee, he was also asked whether he considers it ethical to have had conversations with Aloysius when he Sujeewa was a member of COPE that was probing Arjun?

His reply was: “Yes, it is ethical. We at COPE have the right to hold any opinion we want on behalf of our party. Our duty is to protect our party. There is nothing ethically wrong in that.”

So does it mean that members of the COPE can carry with them their party baggage into the COPE conclave? The COPE, after all is a commission of inquiry, a sort of quasi judicial body tasked with the duty of inquiring into the bond issue in an impartial, non partisan way?

One was under the impression that the public paid for the parliamentary appointed COPE to conduct its inquiries and submit its report impartially, especially since the conclusions of the COPE report may form the basis of future action. But now, according to Sujeewa Senasinghe, it’s nothing more than a bunch of party the Prime Minister was sending him to defend the UNP battlement in a no party man’s land of a politically impartial commission.

If Sujeewa Senasinghe had thought so, if he had misunderstood the import of the prime minister’s question and, as a result, held the bigoted belief there was nothing unethical about talking to Arjun Aloysius whilst being a member of a COPE committee probing Arjun’s role in the bond scam, and that he was there in the COPE committee to safeguard the interest of his UNP, he seems, does it not, to have made a serious misjudgment of the role he was appointed to play at COPE by his party leader whom the public know full well will not stoop to order a minion to undertake so foul a commission on a non partisan parliamentary committee charged with the task of inquiry in the national interest:

Does anyone in his or her right mind think that the onerous duty as a member of COPE can be discharged on narrow pedestrian political lines, motivated not by the national interest but by how many points one can earn for party and self? That Ranil Wicremesinghe did not send Sujeewa Senasinghe to COPE to be a hit man to do a hatchet job for the UNP?