On July 5, section C-350 of the Central Bank Commission of Inquiry into the Issuance and Disposal of Treasury Bonds was made publicly available at the National Archives, upon the request of the Presidential Secretariat.
National archives has announced that anyone can get the Bond commission report before 3 pm from the office, on a CD for Rs. 175 #lka #srilanka @groundviews @MaatramSL pic.twitter.com/g9YToqETbb
— Vikalpa (@vikalpavoices) July 4, 2018
This section of the report contains call data records belonging to several persons of interest in the investigation, including former Governor of the Central Bank, Arjuna Mahendran and Perpetual Treasuries Limited director Arjun Aloysius.
The report also details the data that was requested from the telecommunications service providers. These include telephone numbers (upon submission of names and NIC numbers), usage reports including all voice, data and SMS services, and in some cases, individual activity reports from January 1, 2015 to June 6, 2017. It also gives details of the data extracted from Aloysius’ mobile phone – including telephone calls, WhatsApp and Viber calls.
The report was released as news broke that five SIM cards and three mobile phones had been found in the prison ward where Aloysius is being held – one of the phones being found under his mattress.
Last November, the Daily Mirror reported that Aloysius had spoken to members of the Committee on Public Enterprises (COPE) during hearings. The details included details of phone, SMS, WhatsApp and Viber calls with several COPE members. Several MPs strenuously denied any wrongdoing and said the release of the call records constituted a breach of privilege, querying whether their phones had been tapped. The Committee of Inquiry denied this, noting that the data was received from the call data records of Aloysius, Mahendran and information provided by telecommunications service providers.
Interestingly, though data gleaned from Mahendran’s call data records includes details of contact with Prime Minister Ranil Wickremesinghe, then Law and Order Minister Sagala Ratnayake, and former Finance Minister Ravi Karunanayake among others, the names of several of the MPs listed in the Daily Mirror article are not in Section C350 of the report.
The call records also do not include general communication between Mahendran and Perpetual Treasuries Limited director Arjun Aloysius, due to their personal relationship.
Groundviews obtained a copy of the report from the National Archives this morning on a CD, where scanned pages of the report had been saved as individual JPEG files.
In order to ensure readability, we formatted it into a single PDF file, accessible here.