The first school term of 2022 will end of September 07, the Education Ministry said in a statement.
Accordingly, the school term holiday will be given for five days from September 08 to 12, it added. The second term will commence on September 13.
The Ministry added that the vacation of the second school term will be given from December 03 to January 01, 2023 and during that period, the GCE Advanced Level Examination will be held.
MIAP
The surface inflation calculated by the Colombo Consumer Price Index has hit a record-breaking surge marking 64.3 per cent in August, revealed the Department of Census and Statistics.
In July, the rate was at 60.8 per cent.
MIAP
India gifted a Dornier Maritime Reconnaissance aircraft on 15 August 2022 towards strengthening the maritime security of Sri Lanka at a special event held in Sri Lanka Air Force Base, Katunayake. Navy and Air Force personnel of Sri Lanka who received training in India for close to four months shall operate the aircraft. They will also receive operational support from their Indian counterparts.
2. H.E. Mr. Ranil Wickremesinghe, President of Democratic Socialist Republic of Sri Lanka, High Commissioner Gopal Baglay, Chief of Staff to the President Sagala Ratnayaka, Defence Secretary General Kamal Gunaratne, Vice Chief of Naval Staff of Indian Navy Vice Admiral S.N. Ghormade, Chief of Defence Staff General Shavendra Silva and Army, Navy and Air Force Chiefs of Sri Lanka graced the occasion. The landmark event coincided with the celebration of India’s 75th Anniversary of Independence.
3. The aircraft would act as a force multiplier, enabling Sri Lanka to tackle multiple challenges such as human and drug trafficking, smuggling and other organized forms of crime in its coastal waters more effectively. Induction of the aircraft is timely in view of the current challenges to Sri Lanka’s maritime security.
4. Capability of the aircraft to undertake Search and Rescue operations exemplifies its direct benefit to the people. The gift to the people of Sri Lanka will equip the country to contribute more towards the security of the Indian Ocean Region at large. It may be recalled that maritime security has been identified as a key pillar of the Colombo Security Conclave. Speaking on the occasion, High Commissioner Gopal Baglay emphasized that induction of the aircraft will help in creating a peaceful environment for progress and prosperity of the people of India and Sri Lanka.
5. Gifting of Dornier aircraft underscores the cooperation between the two maritime neighbours in the defence and security spheres. Such cooperation is envisaged to add further capability and capacity to Sri Lanka and is in line with the vision of Security and Growth for All in the Region (SAGAR).
(Contents have been taken from the Press Release issued by Ministry of External Affairs on 15 August 2022)
***
High Commission of India
Colombo
15 August 2022
A renowned Sri lankan business leader and successful private sector professional Ajit Gunewardene says e-government is the need of the hour to successfully achieve people’s call for greater transparency, efficiency and productivity.
He also stressed the urgency of leapfrogging into the digital age as an opportunity for Sri Lanka to overcome the present economic crisis.
PickMe Chairman Ajit Gunewardene is urging the Government to prioritise an integrated digital backbone for the country if to successfully achieve the people’s call for greater transparency, efficiency and productivity.
“E-government is the need of the hour. Over the years these solutions have been tripped up due to various self-interests, corruption, and lack of knowledge,” Gunewardene said in the Chairman’s Review in PickMe’s Annual Report for FY22.
“From the ID card to the land registry to customs to vehicle registrations to driving licenses and IRD an integrated digital solution will create a level of transparency and productivity that will add percentage points to GDP for years to come,” he emphasised.
“All of this linked to Right to Information will support the call to eliminate corruption in politics and business. It will bring more people into the tax net. It will provide the impetus required to boost the economy,” Gunewardene stressed.
To illustrate this point, PickMe Chairman highlighted the need for a secure digital land registry system which will help to democratise property ownership and unlock land capital. The traditional land registration is a slow and laborious process, involves many intermediaries, and has maximum chances of fraudulent and fake land transfer.
The land is also commonly used to store funds received through corrupt transactions. Once digitised, Gunewardene explains, Blockchain is a perfect domain for the land transfer process. The ability to securely transfer land ownership using blockchain technology, without involving any intermediaries significantly enhances efficiency and reduces costs.
He argued that this releases what is now an underutilised capital asset to become an efficient financial asset. “Most importantly in the current context transparency of asset ownership is established,” he added.
Gunewardene also stressed that leapfrogging into the digital age is an opportunity for Sri Lanka.
“Employment generation, modernization, efficiency and productivity will be exponential. This in fact can be the panacea for all that ails Sri Lanka. This should be the call of the nation,” added top blue chip John Keells Holdings former Deputy Chairman Gunewardene.
Commenting on the performance of the company, Gunewardene said as the only Sri Lankan digital business of scale, PickMe now touches over four million customers. “We truly understand what digitisation means to the economy. Utilising our platform is cost-efficient and increases productivity manifold. We also provide an inflation-adjusted earnings stream to our partners,” he said.
Blunt policy tools, a far cry from the ‘ ‘social market economy’’ are now being used by the Central Bank on the directions of Governor Nandalal Weerasinghe and his colleague Treasury Secretary Mahinda Siriwardena.
Bilindly using these policy tools along with preemptive debt default announced by Governor Nandlal Weerasinghe is dragging the country into deep economic abyss where the government and the people cannot come out in their lifetime, economic analysts claimed.
Professor Prema- chandra Anthukorala, a renowned expert on trade policy said the following in a recent conference organized by Advocata “In an economy where anti-tradable bias has underpinned vulnerability to the crisis by building up a massive debt overhang
it is necessary to combine ‘expenditure reducing’ policies with policies aimed at ‘expenditure switching’ from non-tradeable to tradable production in the economy. Therefore banning imports will only aggravate the nontradable bias, preventing the transformation into an export-oriented economy. He said.
Advocata institute suggested that Instead of depending on import bans and quantitative restrictions with a myriad of exemptions that only distorts the market, the government should move towards a more uniform tariff structure abolishing the ‘para-tariffs’ that have contributed to the anti-export bias in the economy.
Implementing policies that support the reform process is essential to macroeconomic stability. Policies counter to this can worsen macroeconomic stabilisation
The Ministry of Finance temporarily suspends the importation of over 300 items on the recommendations of Governor Nandalal without considering its repercussions or looking before leep before pushing hundreds of thousands of small business men and women ,persons engaged in MSMES , industrialists and self-employed into jeopardy.
This move tightens already existing import restrictions on imported goods while completely banning the importation of goods ranging from chocolates, and household appliances to raw materials such as aluminium bars and rods.
This policy change comes into effect in a market that is already facing acute shortages of essential goods. Imposing such a suspension of imports will have a significant negative impact on an economy which is already facing a severe crisis.
The import ban is presumably due to shortages of foreign exchange. These arise from macroeconomic imbalances and must be addressed through tight monetary and fiscal policy.
To curb excess demand the government needs to close its deficit by reducing non-essential spending and capital expenditure and raising revenue, particularly focusing on new streams of revenue including asset disposals. Better monetary policy is already showing results, fiscal policy must follow suit.
The proposed import ban will put a significant number of businesses that are dependent on imports in a difficult situation. The most crucial impact will be on Micro, Small and Medium Enterprises dependent on imported inputs for their production process.
The livelihood of street vendors, businesses dependent on selling raw materials and the construction and apparel industries will face severe hardship as a result of these import bans. Also affected will be Sri Lanka’s tech industry as a result of the ban on the importation of electronic equipment.
Net economic losses in the wider economy will increase as this restricts competition. These economic inefficiencies will have to be borne by consumers through higher prices, fewer jobs and reduced economic activity.
This will add to the country’s economic woes and lead to new black markets and corruption. This will also negatively affect exports as some important items needed to produce exports need to be imported.
Therefore the current policy is counterintuitive. Investments will move away from exports to import substitutes and non-tradable goods sectors.
Moving towards an export-oriented economy is the only plausible answer to the country’s severe woes. Import restrictions and similar bans will hamper such a transformation.
In order to face the challenge of forex shortages, the tariffs can remain temporarily high in accordance with the WTO rules. This will be a step toward the ‘social market economy model advocated by the President and the reformers in Opposition. Current policy is a decisive step back from this model.
Earnings from the merchandise exports increased by 2.25 % y-o-y to US$ 1,128.7 Mn in July 2022 as per the data released by the Sri Lanka Customs. This was mainly due to the increase in earnings from export of Apparel & Textiles.
Major product sectors except Rubber based products, Coconut based Products and Spices & Concentrates; Apparel & Textiles, Tea, Electrical & Electronic components, Diamonds, Gems & Jewellery and Food & Beverages as shown in the table 1 below, recorded increased exports in July 2022.
Exports of Apparel & Textiles increased by 21.55% y-o-y to US$ 550.05 Mn in July 2022. The increase was driven by both Apparel and Textiles.
Export earnings from tea in July 2022 which made up 11% of merchandise exports, increased by 2.08% y-o-y to US$ 117.52 Mn. This was mainly due to the higher Export of tea packets (13.57%).
Export earnings from the Electrical & Electronics Components increased by 4.36 % y-o-y to US$ 41.18 Mn in July 2022 with strong performance in exports of Insulated Wires & Cables (8.26%) and Other Electrical & Electronic Products (15.5%).
However, export earnings from Rubber and Rubber Finished products have decreased by 7.67% y-o-y to $ 89.24 million in July 2022, with poor performance in exports of Industrial & Surgical Gloves of Rubber (-20.96%).
On monthly analysis, except shell products export earnings of kernel products and fiber products categorized under the Coconut based products decreased by 25.62% and 15.45% respectively in July 2022 compared to July 2021.
Export earnings from Seafood decreased by 48.99% to US$ 20.65 Mn in July 2022 compared to July 2021. Except shrimps, export earnings from Frozen fish and Fresh fish decreased by 59.5% and 61.36% respectively in July 2022.
Further, export earnings from Ornamental fish decreased by 72.47% to US$ 1.36 Mn in July 2022 compared to July 2021.
In addition, export earnings from Spices and Essential Oils decreased by 26.2% to US$ 33.91 Mn in the month of July 2022 compared to month of July 2021 due to the poor performance in export of Cinnamon (-17.45%), Pepper (-38.36%), Oleoresins (-4.78%) and cloves (-51.87%).
For the period of January – July 2022, merchandise exports increased by 11.8% to US$ 7,604.12 Million compared to the corresponding period of 2021. Major product sectors except Tea, Rubber-based products and Spices & Concentrates; Apparel & Textiles, Coconut based products, Electronics & Electronic Components, Gems & Jewellery, Food & Beverages and Seafood as shown in the table 1 below, recorded increased exports
In response to Sri Lanka’s economic and humanitarian crisis, Deutsche Bank has donated 40,000 euros (approximately Rs. 14.6 million) to provide medicines, storage equipment and 1,000 packets of food to the most vulnerable citizens of the country.
The Bank’s staff also rallied their support to raise an additional 7,453 euros (Rs. 1.9 million) for this cause. Staff also participated in yoga sessions on World Meditation Day on 20 May, to raise awareness about the situation in Sri Lanka.
The bulk of the funds went to the purchasing of medication to support local hospitals. Deutsche Bank worked with the Red Cross Society, who assisted the Sri Lanka Ministry of Health with the distribution to hospitals.
Medicines were provided to District General Hospital in Vavuniya, the National Hospital of Sri Lanka and Lady Ridgeway Hospital for Children, both in Colombo. The Bank also provided the Red Cross Society with tentage and equipment to store medicines.
In addition to the above, Deutsche Bank also supported feeding programs, providing rice to 150 families in need, as well as seeds and paddy grains to 1,350 farmer families to help with their agriculture sustainability.
“As a committed partner to the country for close to 42 years, we have been involved in Sri Lanka’s development and partnered with various social causes over the years. So, it was only natural for the bank and its employees to stand behind the citizens of our country in their time of need,” Deutsche Bank Sri Lanka Chief Country Officer Vikas Arora said.
Over the years, Deutsche Bank’s Corporate Social Responsibility program has actively engaged in addressing most relevant concerns of the local community in Sri Lanka. Supported by active staff volunteers, the program works in the areas of education, community development and women’s empowerment.
Deutsche Bank provides commercial and investment banking, retail banking, transaction banking and asset and wealth management products and services to corporations, governments, institutional investors, small- and medium-sized businesses, and private individuals. Deutsche Bank is Germany’s leading bank, with a strong position in Europe and a significant presence in the Americas and Asia Pacific.
Deutsche Bank has been operating in Sri Lanka since 1980, providing cash management, FX, trade finance, trust and securities services with strong support and capabilities of superior technology on the Autobahn app market.
The Sri Lankan Government has announced plans to privatize part of the national carrier, SriLankan Airlines. The bid to restructure the debt-ridden airline comes as the government, faced with unprecedented economic turmoil on a national scale, can no longer afford to fund the carrier.
According to the country’s aviation minister, Nimal Siripala de Silva, the government is looking to sell a 49% stake in each of SriLankan Airline’s catering and ground handling operations. 51% of each will remain under state control.
Earlier this year, the Sri Lankan Government toyed with the idea of privatizing SriLankan Airlines. The move gathered momentum after the country’s new president, Ranil Wickremesinghe, called for much-needed reforms at the airline, and the selling of its catering and ground handling operations shows that the government is still keen to push ahead with the privatization.
Sri Lanka’s ongoing economic crisis has left millions struggling to buy food, medicines, fuel, and other essential items. The shortage of fuel is also severely impacting the island’s aviation industry, with long-haul flights having to make a refueling stop in the Southern Indian cities of Trivandrum, Kochi, or Chennai.
Shorter flights have been carrying extra fuel for their next flight – a process known as tankering. Tankering fuel greatly increases the weight of an aircraft, limiting the amount of cargo it can carry. According to SriLankan Airlines’ chief commercial officer, this is costing around $7 million per month in lost revenue. That said, the airline did report a $1.2 million profit earlier this year – its first profit since 2006.
However, it will take significantly larger profits to pay off SriLankan Airlines’ debt, which currently totals over $1.2 billion. The sale of the airline’s catering option is estimated to raise around $80 million according to the aviation minister – a mere drop in the ocean compared to its mountain of debt.
Sri Lanka’s national carrier was founded in 1979 as Air Lanka. As part of its strategic partnership with Emirates, the airline was rebranded to SriLankan Airlines in 1998. The carrier was subsequently taken back under state control in 2007, and went on to join the oneworld alliance in May 2014.
From its base at Colombo Bandaranaike International Airport, the airline today operates an all-Airbus fleet of 24 aircraft, including four Airbus A321neos and seven Airbus A330-300s.
Times remain extremely challenging for Sri Lanka and its national airline, and only time will tell what the next few months will bring. As other nations see a boom in post-pandemic travel, the country’s economic woes are keeping tourists away from Sri Lanka.
There are, however, glimmers of hope on the horizon – the country is on the cusp of finalizing a bailout deal from the International Monetary Fund (IMF), which may help to get its economy back on track, and despite massive debt, SriLankan Airlines has made its first operating profit in 16 years.
SIMPLE FLYING
Delhi: Billionaire investor Chamath Palihapitiya’s life is meant to be a movie — a rags-to-riches saga from his early childhood in Sri Lanka, to hard-scrabble poverty as a ‘refugee’ in Canada, and then on to Silicon Valley stardom, and mega bucks.
Or perhaps it could be a corporate drama showcasing the 45-year-old’s meteoric ascent at Facebook despite early failures, lucrative and then not-so-lucrative Wall Street gambles, a fluctuating reputation, and expletive-laden wisecracks. If he played himself, he could flaunt his ripped abs on screen, rather than just on Twitter for his 1.5 million followers.
Whether he’s going up or down, Palihapitiya has a polarising effect on his audiences, which he constantly seeks out on social media to promote himself and dole out wise dispensations on life, love, and how to get The Money. Some fans think he should run for Governor of Californiaor even President of the USA — although as a naturalised citizen who wasn’t born there, he’s ineligible for the presidency, just like Arnold Schwarzenegger. Critics, however, dismiss him as a snake oil salesman, a purveyor of dodgy get-rich-easy schemes.
Until a few months ago, Palihapitiya was relentlessly peddling the money-making power of special-purpose acquisition companies (SPACs) — shell entities that raise funds in initial public offerings (IPOs) with the aim of acquiring companies in a sector.
The idea is that the heavily funded shell company will get on board an operational firm with a product that will benefit from merging with the SPAC to then become a listed company in a jiffy. If such an acquisition doesn’t happen, funds need to be returned to investors.
Palihapitiya has a convincing style. He’s a man who speaks with his whole being, bug-eyed with excitement, fingers splayed out, his accent very occasionally lapsing into sing-song Sri Lankanness. He is sure he’ll be the next Warren Buffet — rich enough to mould the world to his liking (“without capital, you’re irrelevant” he has said more than once).
Like Buffet, he brims with advice, but with more comedic flair, surprisingly vulnerable asides about his dysfunctional childhood and dealing with the imposter syndrome, and a peppering of F-bombs.
Of late, though, Palihapitiya has been under a cloud. SPACs saw a boom in valuations in 2020 and 2021, but right now things don’t look so hot. The bubble has burst, reports say.
The stock prices of SPACs were down in general as the frenzy around them fizzled and five Chamath Palihapitiya SPACs that merged with other companies were trading below the starting price of US$10, it was reported in August.
A few months before, in February, Palihapitiya had stepped down from the board of Virgin Galactic, which his SPAC platform, Social Capital Hedosophia, had taken public. He and Virgin Galactic co-founder Richard Branson both faced an investor lawsuit soon afterwards for allegedly covering up flaws in spacecraft and making money by dumping shares.
In 2012, Bloomberg had extolled Palihapitiya and his investors as a “league of extraordinarily rich gentlemen” who were making money and also saving the world.
In August 2022, the same publication pooh-poohed him and his “shrivelling empire”. “The SPAC king has gone silent”, the headline said.
But maybe it spoke too soon.
Days after Bloomberg’s dismal take on his SPACs, Palihapitiya tweeted that one of his SPACs has merged with a digital medicine company.
Fans and detractors had plenty to say in the comments, ranging from “ready to load up my bags for you, king” to “the scammer is back”.
But, either way, the man is risk-on. And for many South Asians, he remains an aspirational “brown brother from another mother” who beat odds like his “unpronounceable” name —“Chamath Phlaplaitlatlalyaysas or whatever…”— to make it big in the west.
If you want to understand Chamath Palihapitiya, go through the books he recommends. One of them is Adult Children of Alcoholics by Janet Geringer Woititz, a self-help book about growing up with emotional scars wrought by a substance-abusing parent. In this case it was Palihapitiya’s now-deceased father, Gamage.
Palihapitiya was born in Sri Lanka in 1976, and moved to Canada with his family at the age of five when his civil servant father was posted to the Sri Lankan High Commission in Ottawa.
When the posting ended in 1986, his father applied for refugee status and stayed back to give his children a better education, and also because he thought he’d be killed by the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE).
But life in Canada wasn’t easy. His father was unemployed for long periods of time and money was tight.
“I grew up in a very kind of dysfunctional household on welfare. And that compounded a bunch of shit in my life that was not great. We were very focussed on money. It was a huge point of pressure and tension in the family. It created massive depression in my father, drinking. Just, it was very dysfunctional,” Palihapitiya said at a 2017 chat at Stanford University.
A clue to how Palihapitiya overcame these odds is on another book he recommends: René Girard’s Mimetic Theory by Wolfgang Palaver. According to Palihapitiya, “the idea is that you’re born without preferences and you kind of just copy what’s around you”.
It’s an idea he elaborated upon in the Stanford conversation: “I just copied… a lot of my life, quite honestly, is just copying the things that I see…Be around high-functioning, high-quality people and just copy the shit that they do. Observe the shit that’s kind of crappy and then don’t do that stuff. It’s not a fucking complicated formula.”
It’s clearly something Palihapitiya has given much thought too, especially in view of another recommended read: The Great Mental Models: General Thinking Concepts by Shane Parrish, which sets out nine mental models to fashion better decision-making by emulating greats like Socrates.
For Palihapitiya, who managed to earn a degree in electrical engineering despite financial constraints, a major role model was tech magnate Terry Matthews. The young Palihapitiya held one of his first jobs at Matthews’ organisation Newbridge Networks in Ottawa, as an IT help desk worker.
“He was a billionaire. And I was like, what the fuck is that word?…this guy was risk on. And I was like, I want to be this guy. I want to be this mega-compounder, swashbuckling around, trying to do really cool shit in the world”, he said at Stanford.
Above all, in Palihapitiya’s book recommendations, you see his intense desire for money, power, winning, and admiration for intelligence and cunning. For instance, there’s Michael Lewis’ Liar’s Poker, a riveting read with bits about Wall Street’s biggest bond traders wagering millions of dollars on poker.
Palihapitiya himself is a poker player who has collected over 100,000 dollars in poker earnings.
But that, of course, isn’t the only way he managed to earn hundreds of millions by his early 30s.
In the early 2000s, Palihapitiya decided to follow his girlfriend and future wife Brigette Lau (they divorced in 2018) to California, where he excelled at AOL and then followed it up with his first venture capital at Mayfield Fund.
But the big break, as it were, came when a struggling startup founder called Mark Zuckerberg, whom he’d met while exploring a tie-up with AOL Instant Messenger (AIM), offered him a job in 2007.
In his book Facebook: The Inside Story, author and journalist Steven Levy details how Palihapitiya had a less than stellar start at Facebook since he was associated with its controversial purchase-tracking programme, Beacon. Levy writes that even Palihapitiya felt he should be fired, but instead Zuckerberg gave him another chance.
This time, Palihapitiya shone as the ideas and execution guy for how Facebook could grow its monthly active users. During his stint, he was both admired and considered a bully, Levy writes, but the results of his work left no room for doubt.
When Palihapitiya started at Facebook, the platform had under 50 million users, and by the time he left in 2011, the number was 750 million.
The numbers in Palihapitiya’s bank balance were also impressive — Facebook had made him a centimillionaire. In 2011, he set up a VC firm called Social + Capital (later rebranded to Social Capital), which invested in companies like workplace messaging platform Slack.
For seven years, Palihapitiya’s company seemed to be going strong. As he put it in an interview with Vox, he was “a billionaire at 32” and “owned a sports team at 33 or 34”, but he wasn’t “happy” and was going through an “identity crisis”— something that he realised when looking back at his 2017 Stanford interview.
That’s around when, he claims, that he decided to change the game in a self-professed quest to live a more “authentic” life and “make a difference”. By the next year, he had a new partner, the Italian pharma heiress Nathalie Dompé, and a rejigged business.
Mid-2018 was a period of huge churn for Social Capital, with some commentators writing its obituary, citing the cause of death as an “ego-fuelled collapse”.
The symptoms included Palihapitiya deciding that his company would no longer raise funds like a usual venture capital firm, and two co-founders and several senior executives quitting as a response.
In a Medium post in September that year, Palihapitiya announced wryly that “reports of our death have been greatly exaggerated” but that going forward Social Capital would no longer be accepting outside capital; instead, it would “become a technology holding company that will invest a multi-billion dollar balance sheet of internal capital only”.
In effect, Social Capital switched from the traditional venture capital model — which looks to sell its stake in the investee startup as fast as possible to profit quickly — to a more permanent model of investing, where investors take a more long-term approach to building and nurturing the company into a sustainable business. The new approach would be closer to what Warren Buffet’s Berkshire Hathaway does.
Since 2018, Social Capital has launched two SPAC platforms, Social Capital Hedosophia and Social Capital Suvretta, to give companies another way to go public. Social Capital now invests in areas like climate science, the life sciences, crypto/ decentralised finance, and deep tech.
So far, Palihapitiya has been part of 18 SPAC deals.
Through his tweets, his CNBC appearances, by backing the retail investors on Reddit’s WallStreetBets group against established Wall Street investors, Palihapitiya built legions of support for himself and his causes, like the SPACs.
There was a time when stock the price of Virgin Galactic, Palihapitiya’s first completed SPAC deal, was up a whopping 172.9 per cent.
Soon afterwards, as investors realized the markets were going cold on SPACs and that the Palihapitiya charm on the SPAC stocks was fading, some started writing his business obituary yet again.
Others questioned his integrity. As one Bloomberg profile noted, tongue in cheek, Palihapitiya was doing “just fine”, buying himself a US $75 million Bombardier Global 7500 jet, even if the SPAC bubble was bursting.
The profile claimed that with his outspoken and blunt style, he seemed “like the kind of guy who’d take pleasure in calling BS on current stock market hype — if he wasn’t the one behind it.” In other words, that he operates rather like a highly sophisticated confidence trickster.
This August, an Insider breakdown of Palihapitiya’s SPAC track record came with a warning of “double-digit losses” for investors.
As for Palihapitiya, he doesn’t seem to be too broken up about the write-offs, perhaps on account of having already survived a round back in 2018.
He still appears to be going about his life, tweeting, announcing deals, and doing podcasts with three of his “besties”— David Friedberg, an ex-Googler who later started up and sold his firm for a billion dollars; Jason Calacanis, a reporter turned entrepreneur and investor, and David Sacks, who sold his company to Microsoft for $1.2 billion.
The four talk about everything from startup fundings, to world politics and climate. One episode even talked about Sri Lanka when the country was facing its political and economic crisis. Palihapitiya shared how he and Google tried to introduce a free internet service via ‘Google Loon’ in Sri Lanka but they eventually backed out after (apparently unfounded) allegations that they were trying to steal spectrum.
Meanwhile, late this month, Palihapitiya’s SPAC jumped nearly 200 per cent in after-hours trading after his deal with the digital medicine company Akili.
As for the credibility of SPACs in general, potential investors would be well-advised to remember that everything is subject to market risk, so due diligence can never be delegated. Not even to your brown brother from another mother.
THE PRINT
Chairman of the Sri Lanka Podujana Peramuna GL Peiris made a special statement today and announced that 13 MPs including himself will sit in the opposition in Parliament. With the decision of this group, the government has lost its majority power.
In the last general election, the Sri Lanka Podujana Peramuna won 149 seats and the number of seats held by the ruling party had exceeded 150 with the addition of members from the opposition to the government on various occasions, including when the 20th amendment was passed.
At present, the Sri Lanka Freedom Party is working independently and the group including Wimal-Gammanpi-Vasu is also sitting in the opposition. Headed by Anura Priyadarshana Yapa, 06 MPs work as a separate group and the GL-Dallas group also joined the opposition today.
Due to this situation, the number of MP seats owned by the ruling party has decreased to less than 100.
In order to pass the interim budget presented to Parliament yesterday, at least 113 MPs must be in favor of it. The independent groups from the ruling party have so far not expressed a definite decision whether they support or oppose the budget.
