Some good, some bad, some nasty

Another tumultuous year has ended. Sri Lankans don’t believe in doing business the easy way. Why go straight from Point A to Point B if you can add argument, baste bullshit, curry controversy and drizzle debate in a spicy recipe that serves up an indigestible mess which is hard to stomach for even us easy-going folk. From that man Bond, Arjuna Mahendran, to the Sri Lankan Airbus fiasco to ETCA to the foot-dragging FCID to the sour BOC-Seylan Bank deal, the list goes on and on.

Yet, there is a glimmer of hope among all this heartburn. In Jaffna the reconciliation process is best told by Navaratnarajah Nimaltan, a busboy in a new hotel opened by none other than President Sirisena himself. A locally-built race car was taking part in the world’s biggest student competition at Silverstone and a Nano revolution was taking place in Homagama underlining the creative talents of Sri Lankans. For every handful of contentious and divisive stories there is one nugget that helps us keep believing.

In 2016, the Business Times moved with the times and was at the forefront as always breaking stories as well as providing readers with a more diverse content from the trenchant new-look editorial ‘Kussi Amma Sera’ to offbeat columns like ‘Strictly No Business’ and entire pages devoted to encourage Start-ups and Technology.

We will jog your memory with this review of all our efforts to keep you informed. Happy reading, that is, if it doesn’t make you tear your hair out with frustration. Sri Lankans love to ‘Miss the Bus’. Let’s hope that will not be the case in the New Year. It was a case of More the Merrier. Why go to Harvard when Citizen Silva could have offered advice free of charge.

The controversial on-off Krissh deal is finally sealed. Transworks House, a British era heritage building in Fort, will make way for yet another US$650 million mixed development project. Hot on the heels of this comes another mega-investment announcement with billionaire investor George Soros promising to invest his millions (initially US$300 million) in Sri Lanka. It remained a promise as the year ends. The local hotel industry is meanwhile hot under the covers with the news that SriLankan Airlines will pull out of Europe. No flights mean fewer tourists. The heat is also on the directors at the broking arm of primary dealer Entrust Group, removed on the orders of the Central Bank. They were sacked for putting depositors and investors at risk. How caring of the Central Bank and its governor Arjuna Mahendran.

Off the track

Things go off the track, momentarily. The government abandons the (Comprehensive Economic Partnership Agreement) which was ditched due to protests from industrialists. The debate still rumbles on. The ugly head of controversy rears its head again inside the Central Bank (CB) with allegations that influential money market traders (read Arjun Aloysius) had purchased large stocks of Treasury bonds and sold it at a premium a few weeks later to the EPF (Employees Provident Fund). This followed the hullabaloo over the CB’s 10 billion rupee bond sale which was sold at higher than normal rates. Meanwhile Seylan and NDB (National Development Bank) are in talks to jump into bed together. It is all very preliminary as they are in the courting stage, just holding hands only (more on Seylan later in the year).

The Government announces that work on the stalled Colombo Port City will resume. Inscrutable China holds all the aces, Sri Lanka has bluffed and lost, as it will emerge later in the year. The wheeling and dealing continues. It emerges that Shalika Foundation, a Sri Lankan NGO (non-governmental organisation) is at the centre of a billion-dollar-global money laundering probe involving unknown hackers who broke into the website of the Bangladesh Central Bank. The puppeteer is from Hambantota. Whoever said this was a sleepy fishing port was wrong. There are sharks here.

The sharks are missing, only savvy scientists are around in the backwater of Homagama where the Sri Lanka Institute of Nanotechnology is situated. The country’s first hub for nanoscience has the most number of PHDs in the country – 21- all of whom are involved in research and development of products which will give the country a cutting edge in areas as diverse as agriculture and garments. The Nano revolution is small but beautiful.

Robotics and the Fourth Industrial Revolution

Another upheaval, the Fourth Industrial Revolution and the speed of innovation was the topic at a talk by Chief Guest Vajira Dissanayake at the Sri Lanka Institute of Information Technology. The learned professor outlined the disruptive technologies that have transformed life – from the mobile Internet to advanced robotics. But there is no need for disruptive technology among our politicians. They are in a class of their own when it comes to being unruly and troublesome – the meaning of disruptive.

Up in the hills, plantation companies and tea estate workers are at a deadlock over a wage hike. The companies and the Ceylon Workers Congress blame the impasse on the trade unions which is apparently still clinging to a model used when the British first planted tea. The hills are alive not with the sound of music but just disgruntlement. We love protests next to cricket. A BT-RCB Poll shows that most Sri Lankans believe the management of the debt-ridden national airlines must be handed over while ownership must be retained. One respondent said