SEC confident of bringing crooks to book

Sri Lanka's stock market regulator says that it will have the last laugh.

The Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC] which has received and still receiving flack for its slow process in bringing stock market offenders to justice says that lay people don't understand the difficulties in this sector.

This statement came from SEC officers on the back of the regulator charging businessman Dr. Sena Yaddehige for insider dealing recently.

"What many don't know is that we operate in a jurisdiction which challenges us with many legal issues. It takes time to establish evidence. No one really understands this situation," an official told the Business Times. He reiterated that the SEC works on its own time and doesn't factor in the urgency of the public (to close the cases). "We are not answerable to (those) people who say we haven't done anything."

He added the regulator has to be careful when filing cases against the perpetrators.

The Business Times independently established that the SEC has been slow in its probes against stock market manipulators who were hogging the market during the Mahinda Rajapaksa era. SEC Chairman Ranil T. Wijesinha, who was unavailable for contact on this story, noted in an earlier interview to the Business Times that the SEC investigation division had a serious capacity issue which he managed to rectify.

The officials charged that going to courts against the manipulators isn't as easy as what people say. "We don't want to work on other people’s urgency. We will have the last laugh," another SEC official promised.