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by Elmo Leonard The

Ceylon Electricity Board (CEB) would by year-end incur a running loss of Rs 30 million, bearing emergency purchases to counter the current need for electricity. Today, the CEB is saddled with a deficit of Rs 17 billion, a bureaucrat revealed.

The Ceylon Petroleum Corporation had a current deficit of Rs 18 billion, while most of 25 corporations under the Ministry of Enterprise Development, Industrial Policy and Investment Promotion, were undergoing losses. These losses were highlighted by Secretary to the Industries Ministry, Ranjith Fernando at a seminar on `Investment opportunities in the new economy,' held last week. "Such loss making was a huge burden on the budget," he emphasised.

The Industries Secretary said that the state of affairs in these corporations were deplorable. For instance, a corporation (which he did not name) was closed down in August 2000, while in capital alone the corporation owed the state banks Rs 375 million. The 2050 employees the corporation counted, continued to draw salaries amounting to Rs 18 million per month. There were other corporations as well where a lesser number of employees continued to be paid salaries, from the 1980s.

This circumstance did not mean that people in the private sector were smarter than those in the public sector, Fernando said. The fundamental difference was that the private sector had an efficient leadership. When a private sector enterprise had a management which was inefficient, the shareholders of that company had another management installed in its place. In the case of the public sector, when the management was corrupt, the government in power lost nothing; that iniquity had to be borne by the public.

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