President Gotabaya Rajapaksa has demanded the resignation of all the members of the Board of Investment including Chairman Sanjaya Mohottala, BOI Trade Union sources told the Daily News on Friday.
These sources also said that investors need not panic as President Gotabaya Rajapaksa was expected to appoint a new Board to the BOI this week.
The resentment against the BOI Board was such as out of the 1,100 employees over 900 of them had signed a petition within two days against the Board. This was the first time that all six unions stood together for the common cause, sources said.
Only the employees of the Board who were on leave were not available for placing their signatures on the petition. Even they had expressed willingness to come out of their leave to sign the petitions, these sources said.
Some of the reasons for the employees signing the petition calling for the removal of the Board were the lack of vision of the Board to attract Foreign Direct Investment in consonance with President Rajapaksa’s vision to make Sri Lanka, the Investment Hub of South Asia.
Other operational reasons such as having some political favorite on special ‘five star’ salaries, way above normal which was even probed by the Committee on Public Enterprises (COPE) in Parliament, they said.
There were 29 employees who had been brought under a special unit of the BOI who had been placed on high salaries say from Rs. 600,000 and above and who had to be directed by the senior staff who were getting paid less.
That proposal was also approved by the Cabinet as well and that was why the resentment of the Unions grew against the Board, they said.
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