Opposition Leader Sajith Premadasa has told Parliament that Budget 2027 is “not a budget; it is a budget of sheer lies”, accusing President and Finance Minister Anura Kumara Dissanayake of abandoning Marxism for neo-liberalism and of presenting a package that widens inequality while offering nothing to farmers, small businesses or public servants.

Premadasa opened the Opposition’s response to the budget on Friday. The Daily Mirror has published the speech text in full; Daily FT reported it separately.

The inequality case

Premadasa’s central argument rested on household income data, which he tabled in Hansard. He said real household income of the poorest 20% fell 19.6% while that of the richest 20% rose 6.8%, widening the average gap between the two groups from 11.2 times to 14.8 times, with the richest fifth’s share of income reaching 55.8%. He attributed the shift to inadequate wages, inflation and the erosion of living support.

Those figures match the analysis of the Household Income and Expenditure Survey 2025 that this desk reported on 11 November, in which the top-to-bottom quintile ratio moved from 10.6 times in 2016 to 11.2 in 2019 and 14.8 in early 2025. Premadasa’s comparison uses the 2019 base rather than 2016.

He also cited an October 2026 World Bank report finding 60% of the country poor, and the UNDP multidimensional poverty report. He challenged the official calorie benchmark, saying the government and the Department of Census and Statistics wrongly applied a blanket average of 2,030 kilocalories per person per day when the Medical Research Institute shows requirements vary by sex and activity — an error he said produced the claim that Rs 17,742 a month suffices for one person.

Investment, debt and the IMF

Premadasa said actual foreign investment in 2025 amounted to only one billion US dollars, and listed projects he said had exited, including the Merchants Logistics Hub, the Petronet Kerawalapitiya project and a floating energy terminal. He asked how many factories belonging to the pioneers of the 200-garment-factory programme had closed locally while the same companies opened industrial zones abroad.

He said the government had failed to change the debt sustainability analysis agreed with the IMF as promised in its manifesto, and attacked the macro-linked bonds in the bondholder deal, under which debt relief shrinks as growth rises. “Then what incentive or motivation do we have as a country to increase the economic growth rate?” he asked, saying the adviser that brokered the deal had secured better terms for Ghana and Senegal.

He said there had been no debt restructuring for the 263,000 micro, small and medium enterprises in distress in 2022, that the promised development bank for them had not been set up, and that suspending the parate law — which lets banks auction pledged property without going to court — was not the same as restructuring their debt.

Sectoral charges

On agriculture, Premadasa said farmers were promised Rs 150 per kilogram of paddy but prices had fallen far below that, and that promised interest-free loans and price support through small and medium millers had not materialised. On the digital economy, he said Rs 28.5 billion had been allocated but only five of 17 IT-sector promises for 2026 delivered, that the digital ID promised for the third quarter of 2026 still had no contractor, and that IT parks promised in Digana and Nuwara Eliya had not been built.

He said the budget contained no proposal for the promised 33% cut in electricity bills, and that pledges of a Rs 1.2 million car, a Rs 50,000 motorcycle and fuel at port landing prices had not been kept. He urged the government to grant vehicle permits to professionals including doctors rather than to MPs to stem the brain drain.

Recalling the “Saradiel Budget” presented by Sarath Amunugama, which promised to take from the rich and give to the poor, Premadasa said the government had instead delivered a budget that “strikes the stomach of the common man and the poor”. He urged it to reject both neo-liberalism and extreme Marxism in favour of “the middle path, social democracy, and the social market economy”.

Where the two filings differ

The two reports diverge on detail. Daily FT names the garment companies as MAS, Brandix and Hirdaramani; the Daily Mirror speech text renders the third as “Hydromark”. Daily FT gives the current paddy price as a maximum of Rs 95 per kilogram; the speech text gives a range of “98, 95, a maximum of”. The Daily Mirror text additionally lists Ceylon Petroleum among the exits and carries extended passages on Buddhist scripture, including a reference to the Cakkavatti Sihanada Sutta, that Daily FT does not reproduce.

Sourcing note

Both sources report the same speech, and the Daily Mirror item is a transcript rather than independent reporting — so the two filings corroborate that the speech was delivered and what it contained, but neither tests the accuracy of the claims in it. Every figure above is Premadasa’s assertion unless otherwise attributed. The exception is the income-distribution data, which this desk has separately verified against the HIES 2025 analysis.

Not reported: neither filing carries a government response to the speech, and neither identifies the survey Premadasa tabled in Hansard by name or publisher.