Sri Lankan Airlines: A Response To Phoenix Duty Free’s ‘Feeble’ Press Release

May 6, 2015

An employee of Phoenix Duty Free Services emailed a rather feeble press release that they had carried in one of the local Sunday Newspapers titled “Phoenix Responds To Media Reports on Sri Lankan Airlines Duty Free” recently.

Raju Chandiram

What is rather shocking is that the contents in its entirety is one whereColombo Telegraph could refute each claim as with a copy of the contract in our possession and with concrete evidence in hand, it could be quite rightly stated that its former Chairman Tissa Dharmagunaratne who headed this operation at the inception, CEO Dilan Rumesh Wirasinghe and Managing Director Raju Chandiram are in a vain attempt in trying to cover their tracks in where the Board of Inquiries headed by Lawyer J.C.Weliamuna reported the fraudulent deal where innocent tax payers monies have now been stolen and still continue to.

Phoenix Duty Free Services goes on to say that in the first three years of its operation that Sri Lankan Airlines gained a net profit of Rs 1.1 billon. Nevertheless that figure should have been much higher as Phoenix fails to mention that as reported by Colombo Telegraph earlier, over USS $ 2.5 million was written off by the previous ‘Board of Directors’ of the airline as Phoenix cried foul that the Airline was duplicating its passenger figure count.

The writing off of this figure by the then Board of Directors, but more importantly amending the original contract after the first year’s operation resulted in a monumental figure of a minimum Rs 712 million which the airline lost that should have been added on to the profited figure of Rs 1.1 billion as claimed by Phoenix Duty Free Services.

The following story was described by one of Phoenix Duty Free Services’s very own current employees who revealed much more shocking details that should be information worthy for the new Board of Directors of the national carrier to further work on the ‘Weliamuna Report’ and investigating the expose further and scrapping this daily loss making deal immediately.

“Our Managing Director Raju Chandiram had it all covered from the beginning and least did he ever expect the government to change. We gave Sri Lankan Airlines an unbelievable contract that they could not refuse and in hindsight we were losing a considerable amount of money in our first year of operations in the five year mutually signed contract.

There was no hope in ever recovering from that initial year’s loss and even the Board of Directors felt something was initially fishy. But thanks to our MD Raju Chandiram’s contacts with Members of the Board of Directors, we were able to amend the signed contract between Phoenix Duty Free Services and the national carrier to suit us during the second year and have it back dated. Chandiram himself was a Director of the Board of Sri Lankan Airlines in 2008 when his good friend and current Minister of Foreign Affairs Mangala Samaraweera was a Minister in the Government.                               Read More