The Sri Lanka Board of Investments, which was established with the aim of promoting foreign direct investment to Sri Lanka and providing facilities for such investments, has managed to bring only 20 billion US dollars of investments to Sri Lanka in its four decades of existence.
Citing a report of the Parliamentary Committee on Investment Promotion, The Sunday Times newspaper reports that despite efforts to provide tax holidays and various concessions to promoters, it has not been possible to get the expected results from this agency due to haphazard planning without a proper plan or target.
In a situation where Sri Lanka is still unable to get an annual export income of 20 billion US dollars, the failure of the Sri Lanka Investment Board needs to be examined thoroughly.
Taking this FDI into account, the total amount of investment that our country has attracted in the last 40 years is less than half of what Elon Musk, a billionaire on the cutting edge of technology, paid for Twitter for 44 billion US dollars. Elon Musk, who started his business as a young man in 2000, has built up a total of 188 billion dollars in 22 years. It is more than nine times the investment value brought to Sri Lanka by the Sri Lanka Board of Investment in 40 years. The Board of Investment has been controlled by eight executive presidents in this country, and millions of dollars have been spent on the maintenance and high-level officials of this institution.
It is said that the problem is that the Board of Investment should include the foreign loans obtained by existing companies in its investment set instead of counting only new investments when adding up its foreign investment accounts.
The investment board is targeting a total investment value of one billion dollars this year, and it is stated that they have managed to attract $713 million in investments within the first nine months of the year.
Famous business leaders in Sri Lanka such as Thilan Wijesinghe, Sunil Mendis, Sunil G Wijesinghe, Professor Lakshman R Watawala, Dhammika Perera, Arjuna Mahendran, Mangala Yapa, etc. also held the chair of the BOI.
