On February 24, the SLN intercepted a small boat that was attempting to flee to Tamil Nadu, the boat was detected near Point Pedro. Among the group of affluent looking, well dressed female passengers was a young fair girl bearing a close resemblance to VP's daughter - Duwaraka. The girl is said to resemble a younger version of VP's wife - Mathiwadani. MI is reported to be conducting a DNA test on the young girl to establish whether she is in fact VP's daughter. One of the difficulties faced by MI is that DNA testing is not very established in Sri Lanka's and thus takes a longer time than would be reasonably expected, the other problem is that MI lacks a full sample of VP's DNA. MI is attempting to overcome these difficulties, they are already sweeping through medical equipment discovered in VP's former hideouts to obtain a full DNA sample.
Meanwhile, 58th division troops have entered Iranapalai, fierce fighting is reported, the top rung leaders of the LTTE are said to be based in this town, the battle is expected to be fierce and bloody. Also the number of civilians arriving in cleared areas over the past few days have increased - the Wanni civilians are slowly but surely overcoming their fear of the LTTE and have put to bed the invincibility of the terrorist outfit.
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14 comments:
Mahen,
What I heard is that she is not Praba's daughter in any case. It was rumored that Pottu Amman was her lover. After all, Praba took her by force. MI should check Pottu's DNA with this girls DNA, not Praba's. After all, it is an easy thing to since SLA has Pottu in custody. why DNA, let them meet each other only to see the girl running to Pottu saying papa, papa, I missed you so much.
Well if they check the toilets in the under-ground bunkers discovered so far, there should be some skid-marks with VPs DNA.
Is anyone so stupid as to think VP would send his daughter to the enemy in affluent attire with a big neon sign saying LOOK AT ME???
Please. This is another example of very shabby propaganda. After these many years of useless conflict you would think people could do better than this unimaginative story-telling.
++-+=
Mahen some Punnaku from me. Looks like the Sri Lanka is in full collapse. Mahindha mama says no need money but in all reality your people desperately need money and cannot keep the charade any longer. In full collapse. Just like Liverpool crushed manchester united.
Tuesday, March 17, 2009
1 US Dollar = 115.690 Sri Lanka Rupee
1 Sri Lanka Rupee (LKR) = 0.008644 US Dollar (USD)
Interbank rate +/- 0%
This means:
You buy 1 US Dollar : 115.690 Sri Lanka Rupee
You sell 1 US Dollar : 111.740 Sri Lanka Rupee
You buy 1 Sri Lanka Rupee : 0.008644 US Dollar
You sell 1 Sri Lanka Rupee : 0.008949 US Dollar
Median price = 111.740 / 115.690 (bid/ask)
Minimum price = 111.250 / 114.350
Maximum price = 114.525 / 116.310
S.Lanka rupee, shares down; IMF loan awaited
Mon Mar 16, 2009 8:26am EDT Email | Print | Share| Reprints | Single Page[-] Text [+]
Market News
American Express robs Wall St. of fifth day of gains
Alcoa falls after dividend cut; offering
Oil rises over $1 as Wall St. rally outweighs OPEC
More Business & Investing News... * Rupee down on importer demand for dollrs * State banks buy dollars at 114.00 - dealers * IMF loan terms to direct both currency and share markets By Shihar Aneez COLOMBO, March 16 (Reuters) - Sri Lanka's rupee edged down
on Monday led by importer demand for dollars while bluechips
drove the bourse down amid lingering fears over the economy and
a prolonged war. The rupee edged down to 114.10/20 per dollar, from
Friday's 114.00/10. On Feb. 27 it hit an all-time low of
115.75/95 before the central bank intervened to keep it steady. "There was importer demand for dollars," said a currency
dealer. "Even state banks bought dollars at 114.00 and the
market is waiting to see the IMF terms and conditions of the
loan and their impacts on the rupee and exchange rate." The central bank has said the IMF is expected to return to
Sri Lanka before the end of the month to decide on a $1.9
billion loan, aimed at meeting a balance of payments shortfall
and weathering the global financial crisis. [ID:nCOL298469]
-------------------------------------------------------- For Q+A on IMF conditions for the loan see [ID:nCOL381262] For Q+A on where the rupee is heading see [ID:nCOL27614] -------------------------------------------------------- The rupee has fallen 5.4 percent since Oct. 30, after the
central bank allowed depreciation to preserve dollars and
enhance exporter competitiveness. It is down 1 percent so far
in 2009. The Colombo All-Share index .CSE fell 0.8 percent or
13.05 points to 1619.82, its third straight fall to the lowest
close since March 5. "Investors are waiting for directions from both economic
and war fronts amid poor corporate earnings," said Shivantha
Meepage, a research analyst at Acuity Stockbrokers. "IMF money
and a quick settlement for the war could boost the market." Top fixed-line phone operator Sri Lanka Telecom SLTL.CM
fell 1.49 percent to 33 rupees, calculated on a weighted
average, while top mobile phone operator Dialog Telekom
DIAL.CM closed 2.08 percent weaker at 4.70 rupees. Top conglomerate John Keells Holdings JKH.CM fell 2.19
percent to 55.75 rupees. Market turnover was 55 million rupees ($0.78 million),
below an eighth of the 2008 daily average of 464 million
rupees. The interbank lending rate or call money rate CLIBOR
edged down to 11.923 percent from Friday's 12.242 percent. For secondary market rates, please see
($1=114.15 Sri Lankan rupees)
(Editing by Bryson Hull)
Navindran said...
"... Looks like the Sri Lanka is in full collapse...Just like Liverpool crushed manchester united."
Okay.. the last part was funny but your constant penchant for posting useless information has got to go. Of course the Lankan economy is going down the pipes... the entire world is in recession... please keep up on current events and go easy on wasting bandwidth.
/+/+
Navindran has been singing the same song & doing the same dance for as long as I have been reading these. Can you say ONE TRICK MONKEY?!
One would have difficulty taking his opinions seriously now despite his plastering the blog with useless facts & figures, if one ever did before.
Slaughter those LTTE terrorists and save the innocent thamil folk from these monsters who call themselves "the saviors" of thamil people. Innocent thamil folk deserve better. This WAR has always been, is and will be against the god damn LTTE terrorists and not against regular, law abiding, innocent thamil people whom we love and respect.
I hope they find the terrorists that ambushed the SL Army truck in Odusuddan. If that video doesn't show what kinds of animals these LTTE bastards are, not sure what will. Did anyone see how they shoot at already dead soldiers? My heart sank. When we find those asswipes, let's torture the living shit out of them. If you send one of ours to the hospital, we will send TEN of you LTTE bastards to the morgue.
LONG LIVE KARUNA & Pilliyan!!! Without their steadfast support, we would never be in the position we're in today.
You know why DNA testing is not allowed in Sri Lanka. You dont want to prove that actually the majority of the people in the island are tamils. Most of the tamils are buddisht. However some lion fucked your women, I mean the storybook itself starts off with something thats out of the world. I guess i know where you defencewire and defencenet get your stories from.
Malindra is actually mahen.
Anyway reuteurs, LBO, IMF and every sensible group of people are saying this. But wait if you believe in the idiotic stories then you will not believe the truth. The blog owner has faced a crushing and hun=muliaiting defeat. As such he cannot come to terms that jerking off to porn does not imply he has lost his virginity.
I advise you to go a find a girl and many cheap ones in colombo and galle.
Another one of my fairy tales. The names stated below are tamil bit wsws and all the world newspapers have been doing is to mask them as sri lankan.
Sri Lankan government seeks IMF bailout
By Thusitha Silva and Saman Gunadasa
17 March 2009
Confronting a worsening foreign exchange crisis, the Sri Lankan government is seeking a $US1.9 billion loan from the International Monetary Fund (IMF) to bail out the country. The island's foreign reserves fell from $3.5 billion last July to just $1.7 billion in December as export earnings fell, foreign investors pulled out and the Central Bank spent millions of dollars to stem the depreciation of the rupee.
The December figure is enough to cover just 1.5 months of imports—one of the worst positions of any emerging economy. Last month, Fitch Ratings downgraded its outlook for Sri Lanka to negative, warning that it could run out of cash to cover the current account deficit without a drop in imports or a devaluation of the rupee.
The government and Central Bank officials have desperately downplayed the country's precarious financial position. Central Bank governor Ajith Cabraal claimed that the IMF had approached the Sri Lankan government with a loan offer, rather than the other way around, and suggested that it came without significant strings attached.
In an interview with the state-owned Sunday Observer yesterday, Cabraal lashed out at critics, saying: "Many of these economic horror stories are created by a group of people who wish to see an unstable country and an unbalanced economy and are trying their best to destabilise our country." Such a threat is not an idle one in a country where journalists are jailed and murdered for criticising the government.
President Mahinda Rajapakse is particularly sensitive to any suggestion that he is going cap in hand to the IMF and will have to agree to tough new austerity measures. The government is already facing growing popular anger over deteriorating living standards produced by its huge military expenditures and the impact of the global economic crisis.
The size of the IMF loan request is unprecedented—three times Sri Lanka's quota at the IMF. An IMF team held a meeting with Central Bank officials in early March and are due back in Colombo at the end of the month with a decision.
There is no doubt that the government desperately needs the loan. Dushini Weerakoon, senior economist at the government-funded Institute of Policy Studies, told the media there was a large outflow of $US600 million in the second half of 2008 as foreign investors pulled out of Central Bank bonds. To prevent the currency from collapsing, the Central Bank pumped $200 million a month (between September and November) to defend an "unsustainable exchange rate policy". Despite these efforts, the rupee has depreciated by more than 6 percent since last October.
The country's current account deficit widened to $3.6 billion or 8.8 percent of GDP in 2008 from $1.5 billion in 2007. The main reason for the rise was a huge import bill of $14 billion, coupled with declining export earnings. Although hidden in the figures, a significant element of the import bill was the government's large purchases of arms from Pakistan, Israel, China and Russia. After Rajapakse restarted the war in July 2006, defence spending jumped from 96 billion rupees ($US840 million) in 2006 to 200 billion in 2008.
Oil prices fell sharply in 2008, easing the cost of oil imports. However, Fitch Ratings commented in February: "International oil prices have declined in recent months, and so too has Sri Lanka's trade deficit, but this has not prevented a steady drawdown in official reserves" as a result of high external debt repayments and other net capital outflows. The rating agency predicted a growth rate of just 3.2 percent in 2009, substantially less than the official estimate of 5.5 percent.
Previously the government borrowed on the international money markets to finance the war. In February, Rajapakse announced two measures to raise money—the sale of up to $500 million in war bonds to Sinhalese expatriates and currency swaps with other central banks—but neither was sufficient. As Dushini Weerakoon told the Asia Times: "We have exhausted access to domestic borrowing and international markets."
Commentators have dismissed government claims that the IMF loan would come without strings attached. The Sunday Times, for instance, wrote yesterday: "[T]he IMF would lay down certain conditions that would have to be fulfilled. These could relate to the exchange rate, expenditure on certain items, overall government expenditure and the fiscal deficit. The conditions could extend further to issues of good governance, the implementation of reforms and the privatisation of certain public enterprises."
Pakistan received an IMF emergency loan at the end of last year. The conditions included: eliminating all subsidies on energy, petroleum products and fertiliser; slashing government spending with the retrenchment of hundreds of thousands of employees; and raising taxes. Previously, the IMF and World Bank have called on the Sri Lankan government to cut its fiscal deficit, slash the public sector workforce, reduce price subsidies and implement privatisation.
Already there are signs that the government is bowing to IMF pressure. Treasury issued a directive last Thursday to provincial councils not to recruit any new employees because the government cannot pay their salaries. The agriculture minister announced that future fertiliser subsidies would be tied to sales to the government paddy marketing board. Many poor farmers have no choice but to sell their rice crop to private traders. Earlier this month, the government pushed through legislation that opens the door for the privatisation of electricity generation, transmission and distribution.
Exporters are pushing for a range of measures designed to increase their competitiveness, including the devaluation of the rupee. Export growth slowed from 11 percent in 2007 to 6.5 percent in 2008, but was accelerating toward the end of last year. Two of the country's major exports—garments and tea—fell by 6.3 percent and 22.5 percent respectively in December compared to the same month in 2007. One survey found that 24 garment factories have shut in the past six months.
The Employers Federation of Ceylon (EFC) has already begun to lobby the government for "greater flexibility of labour laws" to allow the "short-term lay-off of workers" and the reduction of the working week from 5.5 to 5 days. The EFC also wants an increase in the working day to 9 hours with no overtime bonuses.
Having imposed the economic burden of the war on working people, the Rajapakse government will have no hesitation in propping up big business and the island's financial system, by accepting an IMF loan that will lead to deepening poverty and unemployment.
LBO>>Banking and Finance
State Support
17 Mar, 2009 07:04:14
Sri Lanka state bank to get bailout
Mar 17, 2009 (LBO) - A Sri Lankan state-run bank that has lent money to a controversial state airline will get a 400 million rupee injection from the Treasury which will strengthen its balance sheet, an official said.
Chairman of Lankaputhra Bank Sarath Silva said the Treasury will inject "about 400 million rupees" in settlement to advances given to Mihin Air, a loss-making state-budget airline that is eating up billions of rupees of people's money.
Critics have held up the airline as a high flying symbol of fiscal profligacy and the wastage people's money.
After losing 3.2 billion in a year of operations, the 2009 budget speech said 6,000 billion rupees of people's money would be set aside for the controversial airline.
Silva said the Treasury bailout is expected soon and would strengthen the bank after reporters questioned the bank's ability to manage or restructure two troubled finance companies of the Ceylinco group in light of bad lending such as to Mihin Air.
Under a Central Bank mandated bailout plan, Lankaputhra is also standing by to buy land from finance companies at 67 percent of their value.
Silva said the funds in settlement of Mihin Air advances would come as a 2-year government bond following a settlement reached with the Treasury, where some of the interest would be set off.
Sri Lanka's overstaffed state banks have been a big burden on the people, and the money now set aside for bailing out private firms – about 4.2 billion rupees so far including guarantees - pale into insignificance beside state bank bailouts.
In 1993 and 1996, about 50 billion rupees were injected to state banks through treasury bonds to make up for bad loans and politically directed lending including to state projects which could not repay the loans, like Mihin Air.
Lankaputhra Bank itself has been merged with another newly created state bank, SME Bank which sagged under its own bad loans shortly after it was created despite the expensive 50 billion rupee lesson, less than a decade earlier.
Banks like SME were created following election promises. Initially they were set-up without a membership to the country's credit information office, allowing 'blacklisted' borrowers to get loans.
Many ordinary people in Sri Lanka have no idea that any government spends money taken from taxing the people, inflation (printed money from the Central Bank) or through what is called 'generational theft' or borrowing through long term bonds which will burden the children of the current generation.
In Sri Lanka the government runs a deficit on the current account of the budget, indicating that the entire capital budget and a part of its day to day expenses are financed from debt.
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The bloody bastards calling mahindha mama pet projects a waste. Kill them all kill them you useless couch potato
Expressing its concern over Sri Lanka’s depleting external reserve position, a report published by the Intelligence Unit of the Economist magazine (EIU) forecasts Sri Lankan rupee to depreciate 7.4 percent in 2009 and 3.2 percent in 2010 against the US dollar.
However in the case of a potential currency crash the EIU predicts the rupee to depreciate by 15 percent or more. Howard Nicholas, a Sri Lankan born economist from the Institute of Social Sciences (ISS) in The Hague, a few months back said Sri Lanka has to devalue its currency at least by 20 percent to survive.
If the forecast of 7.4 percent depreciation materialises in 2009, the rupee will hover around Rs.125 -130 ranges against the US dollar. However, according to Howard Nicholas the rupee should be depreciated at least to Rs.140 against the dollar, which is currently around Rs.113-115.
As a result of this depreciation the government’s increasingly large foreign-currency denominated debt would become more expensive to service, which would probably force the government to cut spending in other areas, most likely on infrastructure investment, the report points out.
This would, in turn, reduce imports (as most construction raw materials are imported), as well as the economy’s future productive potential. Private sector investment would also be hit as raw material imports become more expensive in local currency terms.
However, according to the report, Sri Lanka is unlikely to default its debt payments although fiscal spending will need to be cut down to offset the rising cost of servicing public debt. The Central Bank has been engaged in ‘sterilized intervention’ since the beginning of September last year by intervening in forex markets at the expense of external reserves, and printing money to cover liquidity shortages. This eventually pushed the country on the verge of a foreign exchange crisis. Sri Lanka’s external reserve position slumped to $ 1.5 billion, which is only enough for 1.5 months of imports in December 2008.
Given the very humble position of foreign reserves, the Central Bank sought the support of the IMF and currently the two institutions are negotiating a bail out package of $ 1.9 billion.
According to the report this IMF bailout package of US $1.9 billion is unlikely to demand tough conditions for lending, as Sri Lanka had relatively liberal trade and economic policies for an emerging economy.
The report also predicts the country’s GDP growth will slow to 3% in 2009, before accelerating again to 5.7% in 2010.
“The slowdown in 2009 will be largely caused by a fall in exports as demand withers in the crucial EU and US markets. If EU ends Sri Lanka’s access to preferential trade treatment in 2009 in response to human rights concerns, it could aggravate the downturn in exports. As international prices for many goods are likely to decline in 2009-10, inflation in Sri Lanka should fall to 9.9% in 2009 and 7.4% in 2010” the report points out.
The Economist Intelligence Unit headquartered in the United Kingdom, is a specialist publisher serving companies establishing and managing operations across national borders.
Source :The Nation
God! Navindran, Get a job man! You are such a waste of space!
You are posting plagiarized ideas without giving reference, and crying Economic collapse won't bring you your Peelam!
Go be ignored elsewhere or just self immolate!
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