On March 27, Kumara Jayakody walked into the Colombo High Court, was formally indicted on corruption charges, posted bail, and had his fingerprints taken. Then he returned to his ministerial office. On April 10, 153 Members of Parliament from the National People's Power voted to keep him there. He remains Sri Lanka's Energy Minister today — attending Cabinet, drawing a public salary, governing a portfolio that just lost seven billion rupees of public money.
If this had happened under Mahinda Rajapaksa, or Ranil Wickremesinghe, or Gotabaya, the Janatha Vimukthi Peramuna would have been in the streets before nightfall.
The friendship the government will not name
Kumara Jayakody is not in Cabinet because he is the most qualified man in Sri Lanka for the energy portfolio. He is there because he is one of President Dissanayake's closest personal associates. Their relationship was cemented in 2004, when Dissanayake briefly served as Agriculture Minister and facilitated Jayakody's entry into the Ceylon Fertilizer Company — the very institution at which the CIABOC indictment originates.
By 2024, Jayakody was not merely a political ally. He was something closer. A senior JVP insider told this publication that Jayakody shares a strong bond with the president. When the NPP secured its historic parliamentary majority, Jayakody entered through the National List and was handed one of the most powerful and corruption-prone portfolios in the state. Sources within the party are clear: that appointment was not routine. It was personal, made directly by the president.
Two failures. One minister.
The case against Jayakody has two distinct threads.
The first thread is legal. The Commission to Investigate Allegations of Bribery or Corruption has indicted Jayakody under Section 70 of the Bribery Act for conduct in 2014 and 2016, when he served as Procurement and Imports Manager at the Ceylon Fertilizer Company. The specific charge: that he released a 20 percent advance payment of Rs. 8.8 million to a private contractor without the required bank guarantee or performance bond, providing undue financial advantage to that contractor at the state's expense. The case carries 21 witnesses, 29 court productions, and a pre-trial conference set for May 6.
The second thread is administrative — and it is more immediately damaging to the government's position, because it happened entirely on Jayakody's watch. On April 2, the National Audit Office released a special report on coal procurement for the Lakvijaya Power Plant at Norochcholai, Sri Lanka's only coal-fired station, supplying between 30 and 40 percent of the national grid. There is no backup for it. When it underperforms, the country pays.
The audit found 19 irregularities. They are worth reading in full:
The winning supplier, Trident Chemphar Limited, had not completed its registration when tender documents were issued. Documents went by email on August 18, 2025. The company applied for registration the following day. The contract was signed on November 19. The Attorney General's clearance arrived on November 20. The contract was executed before it was legally cleared. A laboratory certifying coal quality at the loading port had its licence revoked in late December 2025. The Lanka Coal Company continued accepting its reports for twelve subsequent shipments. Nobody stopped it.
Coal arriving at Norochcholai recorded calorific values as low as 5,520 kcal/kg against a contractual minimum of 6,150. The plant burned more coal than planned to generate the same electricity — an overrun estimated at over 114 million kilowatt-hours. Between November 13 and December 30, a critical window before peak demand season, not a single coal shipment arrived. Forty days. Zero deliveries. When the crisis became unavoidable, the ministry authorised emergency procurement from a supplier that had previously failed to meet quality standards.
The audit's financial tally: Rs. 2.237 billion in direct losses from burning substandard coal. Rs. 2.332 billion in penalties theoretically recoverable from Trident for specification failures. President Dissanayake himself told Parliament on April 7 that total losses could reach Rs. 7 billion.
The defence that does not defend
"The procedure was not the problem. The coal quality was the problem."
— President Dissanayake, Parliament, April 7, 2026
If the procedure was not the problem, who authorised procurement from an unregistered supplier? Who signed a contract before the Attorney General cleared it? Who accepted quality reports from a laboratory whose licence had been revoked? Who missed forty consecutive days of imports into the country's only coal plant — and then, when the crisis broke, bought emergency coal from a company that had already failed once? Procedure is precisely what protects a country from these outcomes.
The government's formal position reduces to two sentences. First: the CIABOC charges relate to conduct before Jayakody became minister, so they do not bear on his fitness for office. Second: the presumption of innocence means he cannot be removed on the basis of an allegation alone.
The presumption of innocence is a courtroom standard. It was designed to protect citizens from the coercive power of the state in criminal proceedings. It was never designed to settle the question of who should hold executive authority over a seven-billion-rupee energy portfolio. Those are two entirely distinct questions, and conflating them is not legal sophistication — it is legal camouflage for a political calculation. In every functioning democracy, the standard for ministerial fitness has never been the same as the standard for criminal conviction.
Ministers resign at the point of serious allegation — not at the point of proven guilt — because they hold a different kind of trust. Public trust is not governed by rules of evidence. It is governed by whether citizens believe that the people exercising power over their lives are doing so with clean hands and sound judgment.
What 153 votes actually bought
The no-confidence motion was defeated on April 10 by 153 votes to 49. The government will record this as a victory. A no-confidence motion is a parliamentary event. It has a date, a vote, a result — and then it is over. What does not end is the underlying reality it was called about: a minister with a High Court indictment, a ministry with Rs. 7 billion in losses, and a procurement system the Auditor General found broken in nineteen distinct ways.
By voting 153 to 49, the NPP did not defeat that story. It wrote it. Every one of those 153 MPs now owns a sentence that will be read back to them: they kept an indicted minister in Cabinet, deployed their parliamentary supermajority to kill the accountability vote, absorbed Rs. 7 billion in losses from his ministry, and called it due process. The government holds 159 seats. It does not need Jayakody to pass a budget, implement a reform, or govern anything. The only thing his continued presence in Cabinet now provides is evidence — evidence that this government, when it comes to its own, behaves exactly like the governments it replaced.
What Changed: The Man, or the Position?
The NPP did not win in 2024 because Sri Lankans were seized by enthusiasm for the JVP’s political economy. It won because the country had been run to ruin by a political class that treated state resources as personal inheritance, and the people were exhausted. The 2022 Aragalaya was not an ideological event. It was a cry of pain from citizens who had run out of gas, run out of medicine, run out of patience. At that moment, the NPP — and its leader, Anura Kumara Dissanayake — offered something different. A political movement, and a man at its helm, that had spent years in opposition doing what Sri Lankan politicians almost never do: using evidence. Holding up procurement files, audit reports and tender documents in Parliament, and saying, line by line: this is how the money was stolen, and here is who stole it. Together, they built their political reputation on specificity — on naming exact figures, exposing exact failures, and demanding exact accountability.
The National Audit Office's report on Norochcholai coal procurement is, in its structure, precisely the document that Dissanayake would once have held up from the opposition benches. An unregistered supplier handed a billion-rupee contract. A testing laboratory with a revoked licence certifying coal quality for twelve shipments. Forty days without a single delivery to the plant that keeps the national grid alive. Seven billion rupees in losses. Under a previous government, he would have called it what it is.
Under his own government, his Cabinet spokesperson says the minister stays and the courts will decide.
Those who voted for the NPP are not naive. They have seen this pattern before — from the SLFP, the UNP and the SLPP: the language of ‘due process’ invoked to shield a political ally, even as the same system moves swiftly against others. It is a pattern Sri Lankans recognise not because it was explained to them, but because they have lived through it, repeatedly.
The standard now in question is not an abstract one. It is the standard the NPP and Anura Kumara Dissanayake claimed for themselves — clarity, consistency and accountability. Sri Lanka is watching to see whether that standard will be upheld in power, or quietly set aside in the language of power.
