Restaurants that cook on LAUGFS gas will raise the price of kottu and rice by Rs. 15 from midnight on Saturday, with short eats going up Rs. 5, the All Ceylon Restaurant and Hotel Owners’ Association announced — the first consumer-level consequence of the gas price increase that took effect a day earlier.

The association told Hiru News it was revising menu prices because of the LAUGFS increase. LAUGFS Gas PLC raised the 12.5 kg cylinder by Rs. 1,775 to Rs. 6,740 and the 5 kg by Rs. 732 to Rs. 2,720 from midnight on Friday, citing higher international LPG procurement costs — increases of about 36 per cent on both.

The minister’s answer

Industries and Entrepreneurship Development Minister Sunil Handunnetti told Parliament on Saturday that the rise was not a national gas crisis but a consequence of LAUGFS’s own financial and tax position, Hiru reported.

State-owned Litro supplies about 90 per cent of the domestic market, he said, filling roughly two million cylinders a month against LAUGFS’s 300,000 — so only the yellow private cylinders were affected. He said LAUGFS holds Board of Investment concessions requiring 60 per cent of its output to be exported with 40 per cent released locally, alleged the company had not met those conditions since 2019 and had not paid the relevant taxes, and put its losses at about Rs. 10 billion.

Handunnetti accused the company of shifting the burden onto consumers, but acknowledged the problem is real and said the government would take responsibility for a solution — including a mechanism letting customers buy any brand of gas regardless of cylinder colour.

Figures that do not agree

The government’s own numbers diverge. Handunnetti’s 90 per cent state share implies a private share near 10 per cent, while his cylinder counts imply about 13 per cent. Malima MP Chandana Sooriyaarachchi told reporters that close to 20 per cent of the market had been handed to a private company by earlier governments, whose legacy contracts now let it raise prices at will and restrict supply.

His Rs. 10 billion loss figure is also larger than LAUGFS’s reported September-quarter net loss of Rs. 1.54 billion. Neither filing says whether the minister was describing accumulated losses; none of the reports carries a response from LAUGFS to the tax allegations.

Update — the minister calls the timing political

In a second filing on the same parliamentary statement, Hiru reported Handunnetti going further and ascribing a motive to the timing of the increase.

“Why bring this at budget time?” he asked. “The Budget has given a great deal of relief on the cost of living. Erasing that topic, what they want now is to create a story that gas went up at night because of the Budget” — handing the opposition, in his account, a political subject. He said the increase was made in order to wipe out the Budget-relief story.

He also named the company’s founder directly, identifying the yellow cylinders as belonging to “your former Wegapitiya” — W.K.H. Wegapitiya, the founder and chairman of the LAUGFS group — and repeated that the company had not paid taxes since 2019 and no longer receives what it once did “from the Rajapaksa company”, putting its losses at about Rs. 10 billion.

The minister offered no evidence for the claim that the timing was politically motivated, and LAUGFS has still not responded publicly to any of the allegations. The company’s stated reason for the increase remains higher international LPG procurement costs.

A note on the source text: Hiru’s transcription of the quotation attaches the brand name Litro to the yellow cylinders, which are LAUGFS’s — the same sentence then identifies them as Wegapitiya’s. Litro is the blue, state-owned cylinder. The slip is Hiru’s rendering of the quote, not the minister’s point, and this article follows the colour-and-owner identification the quote itself supplies.