President Anura Kumara Dissanayake has extended the term of the Special Presidential Commission of Inquiry investigating coal procurement by two months, to 16 December 2026, through an extraordinary gazette notification.
The extension was issued as Extraordinary Gazette No. 2510/81, the Daily Mirror reported on Tuesday afternoon. Hiru News carried the same decision 23 minutes earlier, at 2.00 p.m. Colombo time, reporting that the commission’s term had been extended “by a further two months.”
This closes a question this desk left open ten days ago
On 10 October, the commission’s secretary D. V. Bandulasena confirmed that it had asked the President for a two-month extension with six days left on its mandate. That report left three things unstated, which this newsroom recorded at the time: when the request was submitted, whether the President had responded, and what would happen to the inquiry’s work if the term simply lapsed.
The second of those is now answered. The request was granted, and the two months the commission asked for is exactly the two months it received.
A gap in the record between expiry and gazette
Both filings state that the commission’s previous term ended on 16 October. Neither says on what date the extraordinary gazette was issued.
That leaves an unexplained interval. The mandate expired on a Friday; the extension was reported on the following Tuesday. Whether the gazette was signed before 16 October and reported late, or issued after the term had already run out, is not addressed in either account — and the two cases are not equivalent for a commission that must take evidence and report within a statutory window.
This is an observation about what the filings omit, not a claim that the commission lapsed.
The commission
The inquiry was established by Extraordinary Gazette No. 2484/08 on 17 April 2026 to examine alleged irregularities and unlawful acts in coal imports, coal-based electricity generation and the associated procurement operations of the state-owned Lanka Coal (Private) Limited. Its remit covers the entire period from the start of coal power generation in Sri Lanka up to 16 April 2026.
It has three members. The Daily Mirror gives their full formal names as Supreme Court Judge Kulugammana Mudiyanselage Gihan Himanu Kulugammana, Court of Appeal Judge Aditya Karunaratne Maddumapatabendige and High Court Judge Hettisinghege Sanjeewa Somaratne — the judges this desk and other outlets have referred to as Gihan Kulatunga, Aditya Patabendige and Sanjeewa Somaratne.
By the time of the extension request the commission had recorded evidence from more than 70 people and issued notices to 18 individuals, among them former Power and Energy Minister Kumara Jayakody, requiring them to set out their position on irregularities it had identified.
A discrepancy on the governing statute
The Daily Mirror cites the extension as made “under Section 4 of the Special Presidential Commissions of Inquiry Act, No. 4 of 1978.”
This desk’s earlier reporting, and Ada Derana’s account of the same gazette, both give the governing instrument as the Special Presidential Commissions of Inquiry Law, No. 7 of 1978. The section number is the same in both versions; the statute number is not. Readers should treat the Daily Mirror’s “No. 4” as unconfirmed against two accounts giving No. 7.
Where this sits in the coal story
The extension lands on the same day that S. M. Marikkar, chairman of Parliament’s Sectoral Oversight Committee on Infrastructure and Strategic Development, tabled a document putting the cost of substandard coal at Rs. 18.3 billion — a figure about Rs. 335 million above the one he gave Parliament on 8 October, and about Rs. 2.5 billion above the Rs. 15.765 billion Energy Minister Anura Karunathilake gave the House the same day.
The commission is the only body with a mandate to establish responsibility rather than quantum. Its report, now due by mid-December, falls after the Budget’s final vote on 14 December.
Not reported
Neither filing gives the date the gazette was issued, says whether this is the commission’s first extension, or reports whether the evidence-recording stage that was due to finish in mid-October has in fact concluded. Neither says whether the 18 who were served notices have all replied, and neither carries any comment from the commission or the Presidential Secretariat.
Ada Derana also filed on the extension, but its site has been unreachable from this desk’s infrastructure for 32 consecutive days under a CloudFront block, so no publish date could be extracted and it is not cited as a source here.
