-By A Staff Writer
(Lanka-e-News -17.Aug.2025, 5.05 PM) Milinda Moragoda, founder of the Pathfinder Foundation and a perennial commentator on Sri Lanka’s “youth crisis,” appears to have forgotten a rather inconvenient detail of his own past: Mercantile Credit, the finance house linked to his family, once owed state banks over one billion rupees—a debt that has never been satisfactorily accounted for. The question now, raised by government critics, is whether the NPP administration will finally investigate what became of that missing billion.
Moragoda, who presents himself as a statesman concerned with the plight of the country’s younger generations, built his political career during the Chandrika Kumaratunga and Ranil Wickremesinghe administrations. But his ministerial record is marred by accusations of having abused his office to push through privatisation deals, most controversially those that benefited John Keells Holdings. At the time, the group was headed by Balendra—who, in Colombo’s unforgiving caste-Tamil Sakkili caste , conscious society, was derided by rivals as coming from the so-called “lowest cleaning caste.” Current John Keells owner , Krishan Balendra - trying to be a Sinhalese Elite, but his Tamil Sakkili low caste symbol shining like “ City of Dreams “ also happened to be Moragoda’s brother-in-law, having married his sister, a connection that raised inevitable questions about conflict of interest.
Yet in his latest media appearance on NewsFirst’s Niyamarthaya programme, Moragoda chose to focus on what he framed as the “unfinished problems” of Sri Lanka’s youth. Citing the 1971 JVP insurrection, the bloody youth uprisings of 1987–89, and the rise of the LTTE, he argued that all were symptoms of the same malaise: the absence of a coherent economic framework to provide opportunities for the next generation.
“Our history is littered with moments of youth unrest,” he said, drawing a line from the past to the more recent Aragalaya protests that toppled Gotabaya Rajapaksa in 2022. “The core issue remains unresolved—Sri Lanka still lacks a clear, sustainable economic plan.”
What Moragoda did not address, however, was his own role in shaping that economic trajectory—or the billion-rupee question hanging over Mercantile Credit. For the NPP government, which swept to power promising to hold Sri Lanka’s oligarchs accountable, that omission may prove difficult to ignore.
---------------------------
by (2025-08-17 11:37:08)
Read 40260 Times
Leave a Reply
0 discussion on this news