National crimes in disaster management 

May 31, 2016

Reports reaching us confirm that politicians and the officials are illegally misappropriating the billions of grants and the machines donated to identify natural catastrophes by the local and foreign organizations. The officials of the department said if the institute was able to utilize those equipments and finances properly the current destruction could have been minimized. The disaster management centre was started following the Tsunami destruction in 2004.

Although there was three phases of the project started in 2014 to identify prior catastrophe situations and despite records indicated that Rs. 2.718 billion has been spent in the accounts of the disaster management center to buy necessary equipments it was unable to locate the equipments bought. Meantime the equipments obtained under the Nederland’s International Center for Emergency Techniques (ICET) project those equipments has come to a stage that it cannot be further used. The 3rd phase has been suspended without conducting an investigation why low quality equipments were imported.
 
Although a tsunami warning unit was fixed at the disaster management center, it was unable to function despite connecting and networking that with the Padukka center.
 
A sum of Rs. 43 million euro’s were taken as a loan from the Nederland’s for this project and the balance money was spent for the political campaign of the former president and the remaining money was spent to construct bridges and drains of the then ministers connected to the disaster management. There are financial frauds alleged to the secretary of the disaster management and although an investigation is conducted by the FCID, despite two previous ministers held responsibility in the then regime are involved in the current good governance the investigations have been halted. Meantime under the UNDP, a disaster management project was started with a sum of US dollar 2.5 million from 2010 to 2013. Under the project in order to construct 100 displaced camps in the north east large tents, beds, mattresses, bed sheets, generators, solar power systems, household equipments, telecommunication systems, mobile toilets and many thousands of disaster helping equipments were presented but all that has been disappeared.
 
We would be ready to reveal many more frauds and corruptions connected to the disaster management center and disaster management ministry in the future.