The government’s plan to pass a new State-Owned Enterprises Act by the end of the year is in doubt because the bill — along with much of the rest of the economic reform programme — has not come back from the Legal Draftsman’s Department, Labour Minister and Deputy Minister of Finance and Planning Dr Anil Jayantha Fernando said on Thursday.
“Lots of the drafts got stuck within the Legal Draftsman’s Department,” he told the Institutional Investor Forum, jointly organised by the Securities and Exchange Commission and the Colombo Stock Exchange, the Daily Mirror reported at 11.00 a.m.
Asked about the SOE Act’s timeline, he said he was unsure whether Parliament could approve it this year, with the next sitting due in the first week of November. “First we need to get it cleared from the Legal Draftsman’s Department. If that is the case, at least we can submit it to the Parliament.”
The bill would let selected state enterprises be reorganised under a single umbrella and incorporated as limited liability companies, giving them autonomy to take decisions on market conditions.
A minister’s account against the President’s
Earlier this month President Anura Kumara Dissanayake said the SOE law would go to Cabinet within about two weeks, and that the economic reform bills would most likely reach Parliament by February. Fernando’s account is the narrower one: the bill cannot go to Cabinet, let alone Parliament, until the drafters release it.
The bottleneck has numbers
The Justice Ministry’s 2025 performance report, cited by the Daily Mirror, shows the department completed and returned 35 bills in all three languages in 2025 — down 42% from 60 in 2024. Revisions of subordinate legislation fell to 104 from 124. The ministry acknowledged the department was operating with a severe staff shortage and that legal reform had been affected as a result.
The staffing figures are starker. At the end of 2024 the department was working with 62 of its 154 approved posts vacant — a 40% vacancy rate — and at senior level 24 of 47 posts were unfilled, including three Deputy Legal Draftsman positions. Most senior drafters have retired, and the department reports that new recruits often leave because pay is low against the workload.
But most of the backlog is not the drafters’ fault
The ministry’s own figures complicate the minister’s framing. At the end of 2025, 74 bills sent out as preliminary or completed drafts were sitting awaiting observations or instructions — 13 with the Attorney General and 61 with other ministries and departments. That is more than double the number of bills the department finished all year.
The department attributes the repeated return of completed drafts mainly to instructing agencies changing their policies. Its 2024 report records the National Building Research Institute Bill being sent back for amendment 24 times and the Animal Welfare Bill 21 times, each round costing as much time as a fresh request. It also notes it has no work programme of its own: its workload is set by whatever ministries ask for once Cabinet approves a policy.
Every bill must also be completed in Sinhala, Tamil and English before release, as the Constitution requires.
What else is held up
- Customs Ordinance amendments, part of revenue administration reform. Cabinet directed the Legal Draftsman to prepare the bill in June on the recommendations of a review committee chaired by retired Additional Solicitor General Milin de Gunathilaka, PC. Four months on, the President said the amendments had been submitted and he expected prompt finalisation.
- The State Assets Management Bill, back at the drafting stage. Gazetted in August 2024, it lapsed when Parliament was dissolved two months later; this month Cabinet halted the 2024 version and ordered a fresh bill on a revised framework from an expert committee.
- A unified labour code, which Fernando had targeted for the end of this year as Labour Minister. It is still with an expert committee and must go before the National Labour Advisory Committee before it can be finalised.
One bill has moved faster. The Public-Private Partnership Bill was drafted, cleared by the Attorney General and approved by Cabinet last week for gazetting ahead of presentation to Parliament — showing the pipeline can work when a bill is not sent back repeatedly.
Not reported
The filing does not say when the SOE bill entered the department, where it sits in the queue, or whether the government has asked for it to be prioritised. It gives no date for the bill’s release, does not say whether any of the 74 bills awaiting observations are the reform bills named, and does not record how many of the 61 held by ministries belong to the Finance Ministry itself. No response from the Legal Draftsman’s Department or the Justice Ministry is carried, and the department’s 2025 vacancy position is not given — the 40% figure is from end-2024.
Single source. This desk checked the Hiru News homepage rail, the NewsFirst homepage listing and the EconomyNext homepage; no other verified newsroom had filed on these remarks at the time of writing. Ada Derana has returned an HTTP 403 to this desk for some 48 consecutive days and could not be consulted.
