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The BOI implosion and the sad story behind it 

16 Dec 2021

The hijinks that went on at the Board of Investment (BOI) were bizarre even by the standards of what’s going on these days. The entire institution was brought to the brink of chaos, at a time the country needed investment as never before. The BOI’s unravelling came to a head in the last month or so, after its Board of Directors resigned. These included some key personalities such as Harsha Cabral, Harsha Subasinghe, etc. The drama seems to have finally ceased after the President’s recent appointment of Raja Edirisuriya as the new BOI Chairman. However, what brought matters to this pass was the appointment of the previous BOI Chairman Sanjaya Mohottala by the Government some time ago. Mohottala seemed to have neither the experience nor the record to manage the key organisation that brings in foreign investment into the country. He was supposed to have acquired some qualifications, but his main qualification appeared to be that he was from the same village as the President. Besides that, he was also supposed to be a close relative of a longtime confidant of the ruling family, who was holding a top post close to the governing duo. From day one, Mohottala appeared to be more of a suave act than the real deal. He had the debonair looks of a well-groomed, well-mannered technocrat, and seemed to know how to smooch around bigwigs and speak in clipped tones. But other than his mannerisms, he didn’t appear to deliver anything. True that things became a very difficult task after the pandemic set in, and that he didn’t have a very investor-friendly environment to deal with. But then, instead of treading cautiously and trying to cajole whatever investors he could in a not-so-business-friendly conjuncture, he, true to his identity as a flashy Johnny-come-lately, began doing some of the most bizarre things that have been done in that institution that J.R. Jayewardene set up as the country’s key investment hub in the 70’s. He started recruiting an entire cabal of friends and former acquaintances, paying them enormous salaries and placing them over the heads of the management veterans of the institution that had been there for decades. Now, it’s all well and good to attract new talent and infuse some energy into an institution that needed to perform much better than it had done.  But, to make any radical changes, Mohottala had to prove that he was able to deliver with the new team that he was paying an arm and a leg to attract. But the new players neither had the credentials, nor were they able to deliver. In fact, the team was made up of neophytes who, just like Mohottala, were fresh faces with slicked-down hair who had not so much as run a mom-and-pop shop before, leave alone carry the experience to attract big business in a competitive global business environment that didn’t exactly care for the “face value” of some self-annointed BOI whiz-kids. The non-delivering merry-go-round of highly paid and much ballyhooed new entrants prancing around, earning top dollar but contributing nothing substantial to the organisation, proved the last straw – the old guard was livid. It may have been correct that the institution needed an infusion of new blood to deliver, but what Mohottala had done was to make it more leaden and unresponsive to any changes from the top, because the top consisted now of neophytes who were getting paid massive salaries, but doing nothing significant to bring in investment. This institution should not have come to this pass – particularly at this hour. Countries such as Vietnam were attracting all the new investment that was coming out of China, which had certain regions hit by the pandemic. Sri Lanka should have been able to grab at least an iota of that exodus of investment opportunity, as we badly needed it. It was vital that we grabbed a slice of that pie not just because the pandemic was shedding investment opportunities from China, but because this trend was offering us a brand new opportunity to reinvent ourselves as an investment hub. But the callow new “talent” at the BOI guaranteed an early full stop to any such possibility. Was this a way to manage one of the critical investment gateways in the country – or the most crucial, to be precise? Most definitely not. But here was the much-touted meritocracy of the new dispensation at work. Meritocracy it was not; a den for nepotism and buddy-system propagation of mediocrity, it was. It was particularly galling that the Government that had advertised for the best talent, saying they were making an apolitical experiment to draw the best talent the country has, ended up this way, promoting and glorifying whiz-kids because they were from the same village, or were the relatives of somebody who was a somebody in the inner sanctums, where the powerful decided who was to be axed and who was to be elevated. The BOI had hitherto been an organisation that had been untouched largely by crass politics, at least relatively speaking. For example it was not like SriLankan Airlines, just to take one instance of an organisation that was often packed with questionable political choices at management level.  It would be a stretch of the imagination for one to say Mohottala hired people at astronomical salary points because he wanted delivery. If that was the case, he should have hired neutral persons who had a previous record of delivering the goods. In contrast, he hired newbies – neophyte young lawyers who had never had any previous sales, business, or investment experience for instance – who were his known friends and associates. There is no question about it. He messed up big time and didn’t seem to have any scruples whatsoever about making a state organisation a happy hunting ground to position his friends and comrades-in-arms so they could draw top salaries and enjoy fat perks. After Mohottala stopped reporting to work after submitting his resignation, some of the persons he appointed drawing obscenely fat salaries still continued to do so, which is what resulted in the BOI being in a continuous state of disarray – something the Government could ill afford at this crucial juncture. The BOI should be the last place for this type of corrupt practice – and yes, packing an organisation with your friends, at high salary points, is corruption too. It’s a misuse of state largesse and falls under the rubric of corruption. The problem is that this Government has apparently made it a practice of plonking people of questionable talent in key state institutions, just because they are known to somebody in the inner circle of power. There are only a handful of institutions in which the meritocracy principle has applied – all others have been packed with cronies, and useless cronies at that.  It is difficult to expect anything more from a dispensation that has insisted on appointing a pardoned convict, the week after his pardon, as the Chairman of the Housing Authority. But, what’s most unfortunate is that the Government was expected to deliver a Singapore-type miracle, and ended up making all these ridiculously inept moves.  But more than inept, these appointments are brazen. They openly scoff at a public that expected great things from a Government that was offering clean and efficient governance. The BOI fiasco is a prime example of how all that turned out. The BOI was made into a little slush fund, in other words, into which friends of Mohottala could dip in at pleasure. And who was Mohottala? The chosen one – you could even say, the ne’er-do-well from a well-connected family. “Well-connected” means well-connected to the correct people at this point in time, not well-connected in the generic sense. Now, that alone seems to be what it takes, in this very peculiar meritocracy.  (The writer is a former Editor-in-Chief of three national English language publications and a practising Attorney-at-Law. He is an Editors’ Guild award-winning columnist, and contributing writer and columnist for Nikkei Asian Review and South China Morning Post, while his editorials have been published in The Australian) The views and opinions expressed in this column are those of the author, and do not necessarily reflect those of this publication.

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