The government is talking about the budget while concealing the real data on the country’s condition, Opposition Leader Sajith Premadasa said hours before the 2027 Budget was due to be presented, accusing it of running a programme that manufactures false figures to produce the conclusions it wants.

He was addressing a pre-budget workshop held with opposition MPs, academics and specialists in the field, Hiru News reported at 8.49 a.m. on Thursday.

The mandate argument

Premadasa’s central political claim was about the IMF. At the presidential election, he said, Anura Kumara Dissanayake took 42% and the Samagi Jana Balawegaya 32% — meaning 74% of the vote went to candidates who had said during the campaign that they would go to a new IMF agreement.

Having won power, he said, the JVP kicked that mandate aside, left the IMF agreement unamended and followed a two-faced policy while people were pushed into hardship.

The debt deal

Premadasa said Sri Lanka’s debt negotiations were handled by Lazard, the firm that also restructured the debts of Ghana and Zambia, and that what the country ended up with was a macro-linked bond.

That instrument, he argued, loads Sri Lanka into a growth-linked debt trap: as the economy grows faster, the amount owed rises with it.

He said that when the IMF met the opposition recently, the opposition told it a responsive agreement was needed — one favourable to the country, that does not shield notorious capitalists, and that gives priority to the 22 million people who hold the country up.

On the restructuring itself, he said working people’s EPF and ETF funds were “pickpocketed” under IMF conditions while the banking sector took no loss at all, with controlling stakes protected. Whoever is in power, he said, the winners are always the trillionaires and billionaires.

The tax numbers

Premadasa said the government had taxed beyond what the IMF asked in order to generate a primary surplus, taking it from 2.3 to 5.4, and had raised state revenue as a share of GDP from 13.9% to 15.4% by taxation. The SJB continues to put forward proposals to bring that burden down, he said.

The filing does not state the unit for the 2.3-to-5.4 figures; in context they are the primary balance as a percentage of GDP, but that is not spelled out in the report and is not asserted here as fact.

The Rs 17,000 line

His most specific attack was on how poverty is measured. Asked how a person is supposed to live on Rs 17,000, he said, the government replies that the figure is calibrated to 2,030 kilocalories a day per person.

Against that, he cited Medical Research Institute data putting daily requirements at 3,340 kcal for an active man, 2,340 for an average man, 2,680 for an active woman and 1,890 for an average woman — arguing the official threshold is set below what most adults actually need.

The government is still determining poverty on false data, he said, adding that World Bank data shows close to 60% of the country is poor.

Aswesuma

Premadasa said there is a real question whether Aswesuma reaches the right beneficiaries, repeating the Samurdhi pattern in which the deserving miss out and the undeserving receive support. Recipients were chosen by a selected group without involving the government officers resident in the village, he said, and a revised Janasaviya programme is now needed to actually eradicate poverty.

He closed on building up agriculture, fisheries, labour and the professions, and called for a new development bank for young people and for micro, small and medium industrialists.

Context the filing does not supply

This is a second Premadasa intervention in two days; the SJB executive committee remarks on Wednesday made the Rs 17,000 argument in shorter form. The workshop is the fuller version.

One of his claims is independently supported from an unexpected direction. EconomyNext’s budget preview reports that President Dissanayake has confirmed active evaluation of a post-March 2027 IMF programme — what would be an unprecedented 18th arrangement — which sits awkwardly beside the charge that the government abandoned a mandate to negotiate a new agreement. That filing is about the budget rather than the workshop and is cited here for context only, not as corroboration of Premadasa’s account.

His 60% poverty figure and the 25% extreme-poverty figure the Ceylon Chamber of Commerce is reported to have cited in the same preview are not the same measure and should not be read against each other; neither filing states the threshold used.

Not reported

No government response is carried. The filing does not date the IMF’s meeting with the opposition, name who attended it, or quote the MRI study directly. It gives no size, capitalisation or timetable for the proposed development bank, and no detail on what a revised Janasaviya would involve.

No other verified newsroom was found carrying this workshop at the time of writing, and the Daily Mirror breaking rail did not include it. The article is single-source.