Premier Ranil Wickremesinghe this week disclosed how the former officials at the front seats of driving the economy into the current abyss continuously held back the truth about the Chinese swap and took the press and entire public for a ride for nearly a year. 

Wickremesinghe in a detailed speech made to Parliament on June 7 said that the US $ 1.5 billion equivalent Chinese yuan-denominated swap line was granted under the condition that the country could only utilise the funds, if its gross reserves are sufficient to cover three months of imports. 

Sri Lanka’s Central Bank announced the striking of the deal with the People’s Bank of China, China’s central bank, in March 2021, for the currency swap for three years but the reserves never reached the level required to trigger its usability while the country was continuously denied of its true nature by the two governors of the Central Bank in 2021. 

Since entering into the arrangement, the Central Bank kept it as a stand-by until the tail end of December 2021, when the reserves nearly exhausted, just to present a number, as an act of window-dressing, to portray a higher reserve position. 

Window-dressing is a term widely used in financial accounting to describe a deliberate action by the presenters of financial statements of a company to make its financial statements look better and appealing when actual financial conditions aren’t so good. 

Ajith Nivard Cabraal, a Chartered Accountant-turned Governor of the Central Bank, ditched questions and at times didn’t directly respond to questions repeatedly raised by the press when asked about the true nature of the swap. 
The current episode is a classic case of how the economies could unravel as a result of constant lying, misleading and fooling the people.

It is also a case where the public conveniently shirked their responsibilities and their failure to call for accountability for the wrongdoers and from those who repeatedly took them for a ride for so many years.  

And now their inaction and selfishness displayed at every turn in the past have come back to haunt them by way of having them to undergo the most deplorable living conditions, which they may never have imagined in their entire lifetime.