Search Results for: Sri Lankan

BY MATTHEW BRACE
FIGHTING money laundering is about getting your hands dirty. The Financial Action Task Force (FATF) may pronounce global standards that it would like jurisdictions to follow, but all governments need help, and often regional bodies are better placed to do the detailed work than more remote global organisations.…

BY ALAN OSBORN
INSURERS should have a much clearer idea of the risks involved in extending cover to the areas hit by the tsunami at the end of last year following agreement by 23 Indian Ocean nations to share data and set up seven regional warning centres.…

BY KEITH NUTHALL
MINES and minerals ministers of the 10-member Association of South East Asian Nations (ASEAN) have agreed wide-ranging cooperation plans to promote their respective mining sectors. At the first of a series of ministerial meetings, (in Sarawak, Malaysia), an ASEAN Minerals Cooperation Action Plan (AMCAP) 2005-2010, containing 19 actions was approved.…

BY KEITH NUTHALL
THAT criminals abuse the insurance industry is nothing new for a sector routinely screening claims for hints of fraud. However, its managers have proved far less alert to the risk of it being exploited by money launderers and terrorist financers, a new detailed report has claimed.…

BY KEITH NUTHALL
GLOBAL tea production hit a new record high in 2004, growing 2% to reach an estimated 3.2 million tonnes, the UN Food and Agriculture Organisation has reported. The expansion was mainly due to increases in Turkey, China, Kenya, Malawi, Sri Lanka and Indonesia, offsetting declines in other major producing countries, notably India and Bangladesh.…

BY ALAN OSBORN
SUDDENLY accountants are being held in unusually high esteem and it’s all because of their work in connection with the relief effort for victims of the Boxing Day tsunami. To date some Pounds 4.7 billion for the stricken countries has been raised worldwide but nothing like that sum has yet got through to the people affected; some of it stolen perhaps and some of it wasted, but a lot of it bogged down in inadequate financial infrastructures: step forward the big multinational accountancy firms who have provided staff, management and professional advice and training, a good deal of it on a pro bono publico basis.…

BY KEITH NUTHALL
MOBILE documentation clinics for tsunami survivors in Sri Lanka have been offering free legal advice and assistance in obtaining personal legal papers lost in the disaster.…

BY KEITH NUTHALL
THAT poor environmental standards harm people’s health is the raison d’etre of environmental health officers committed to improving living conditions across the board. And that the world’s environment is becoming ever dirtier and polluted is a universal assumption: but by how much?…

BY KEITH NUTHALL
THE EUROPEAN Commission has announced plans to bring forward by three months – to April 1 – its planned introduction of tariff preferences for developing countries for those states affected by the Tsunami disaster. European Union (EU) tariffs cuts will follow for a wide range of food products exported by India, Sri Lanka, Indonesia and Thailand.…

BY KEITH NOYAHR, in Colombo

A YEAR after the Boxing Day tsunami, the four badly affected universities in Sri Lanka’s north, south and east are boxing on, with a bare minimum of repairs and reconstruction for want of funds. The University Grants Commission (UGC) had estimated the damage to the buildings and hostels at Ruhunu, South Eastern, Jaffna and Eastern universities to be SL Rupees 72 million (Pounds 387,000 at local prices), but its Chairman Professor Ranjith Mendis regretted that "the government and foreign donors had not been able" to find these sums.…