I just cannot understand how two faced this Government is! Just think they go on and lie to the public that they will not privatize or sell any assets to foreigners and guess what. EPF are under instructions to sell as much of their stock holdings as possible ONLY to foreigners. We locals are not allowed to buy this. These deals are negotiated ones, so they may even sell at below the current already depressed stock prices, giving the foreigners a BARGAIN. I do not trust this govt. so I will not be surprised that there are backhanders galore in this sale to foreigners.
I just noted that EPF have sold an 8.8% stake of JKH to a Malaysian Sovereign Wealth Fund. So now it is another sale of part of the largest Conglomerate in Sri Lanka sold ONLY to a foreign govt. owned fund. The Malaysians already own Dialog, and SLT did you know that? The latter sale was also a questionable deal as it was also the Japanese Stake that was bargain price sold to the Malaysians.
I have no problem with assets being sold to foreigners, if the Govt. came clean and told the public that it is OK for foreigners to own companies that the Govt. fools the people as being Sri Lankan, like SLT for example. Ask any Sri Lankan who owns SLT and Mobitel (have you seen the ADS?) and they will tell you it is the Government of Sri Lanka. It is really one of the Malaysia’s richest businessmen who owns it, one whose family were ethnic Tamil from Sri Lanka who made their fortune in Malaysia.
I am cool with the actual sales, the Govt. needs the dollars to save our bacon, having squandered all our money into their personal pockets, so now they want to sell the other assets of the State and the people such as EPF and take a share of that too, due to the severe foreign exchange shortage they have got into. So this traitorous act by the Government of President Rajapakse must be highlighted as it is discriminating against the citizens of Sri Lanka due to the ruling that the shares must be sold ONLY to foreigners. The latter reason being that they desperately need foreign funds. But what about the foreigners who sell their other Sri Lanka stocks and buy these shares. Then there is no net inflow of funds. The logic by the govt. of the latter is that this will prevent the money from the sale of shares being repatriated abroad, further worsening the balance of payments crisis!!
It all sounds a load of bunk to the uninitiated but trust me that is the case, and all the evidence is there to prove my case convincingly. Let us hope the people of Sri Lanka will wake up and realize that this Govt. is only cloaking their treachery well
The pepper conundrum – a farmers rant
6 years ago
3 comments:
The government does a good job of fooling the Sinhala speaking people, especially those who do not know or are able to comprehend English as all these facts are obvoius in the English speaking press, but not even touched upon in the Sinhala media, except of course some insightful Sinhala bloggers on gossip9.
Keep up the challenging work
Interesting to note how the media is not pointing out that JKH ended up being a bad investment for the EPF.
The block was accumulated with the average holding probably around 2 years old.
They announced that the cap gain was 800mn or about 5.7% With dividends this would probably be bumped up to about 10%.
This is significant underperformance where EPF funds could have been invested in fixed income and generated a 20%+ return over the period.
This deal that the government is bragging about is a loser for the manager of the EPF funds!
The EPF desperately needs an independent, transparent, professional, HIGHLY PAID management.
The top managers of the fund should be getting salaries of US$1mn a year and be sourced from top global talent.
It is a US$10bn fund by the way!
This would ensure less corruption and better management which would also probably ensure better returns.
Every basis point of increased return is US$100mn.
Time to take the hands of this fund out of brainless rogues!
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