Sri Lanka’s state owned enterprises ratcheted up losses amounting to 18 times the annual pay as you earn taxes collected from wage earners from around 2006, when privatisation was halted, a think tank has said.
When state enterprises ran losses they were covered by loans taken from domestic banks as well as from capital markets.
“From 2005 to 2021, roughly over 15 years, state enterprises have accumulated losses of 1.8 trillion rupees,” Dhananath Fernando, Chief Executive of Advocata Institute told reporters in Colombo.
