The Employees Provident Fund has invested about a trillion rupees in the Colombo Stock Market in recent years, but the returns have been very low, UNP MP Jayalath Jayawardena said yesterday.
Addressing the media in Colombo, he said that the Securities Exchange Commission had fallen to its lowest since August 2010, with the All Share Price Index dipping below the 5,000 mark, but the government claims that there was nothing to worry about.
The MP said that EPF members are entitled to know the fate of their monies, totaling a trillion rupees, which had been used to purchase securities, but the authorities were refusing to divulge the correct statistics.
The government had no right to squander the hard earned savings of workers to prop up loss making State ventures, Jayawardena observed.
Eran Wickremeratne MP said that the EPF had paid its members an interest of less than four percent for the high risk investments it had made in the Stock Market, in 2009 and 2010.
The four percent return had been camouflaged within the overall average of 13 percent given during the said two years, he noted.
Wickremeratne said that due to the Fund not publishing details of the investments it had made in listed and unlisted equities and the dividends, the general membership was unable to discern the exact losses that had been incurred by purchasing shares at way above its intrinsic values.
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