The Consumer Affairs Authority has summoned LAUGFS Gas executives to appear before it on Monday, 16 November, to answer for the Rs 1,775 increase the company added to the 12.5 kg domestic cylinder, Hiru News reported on Sunday morning.
The Authority said the inquiry will examine the increase made on the strength of various cost claims, and whether those claims are internally consistent.
That is the regulator’s first recorded response to the increase, and it goes directly to the question the company’s own public defence left open.
What the company has said
LAUGFS raised prices from midnight on Friday, 13 November, lifting the 12.5 kg cylinder from Rs 4,965 to Rs 6,740 and the 5 kg cylinder from Rs 1,988 to Rs 2,720 — increases of Rs 1,775 and Rs 732. The figures match those already published by this desk.
At a news conference in Colombo on Saturday, company director and chief executive Nalinda Kurukulasooriya — rendered Kurukulasuriya in the Hiru filing — attributed the rise to higher world market prices, higher shipping charges, higher insurance charges and exchange rate movement, and said that although the price had gone up it was not an unfair increase. He had separately itemised the increase into five cost lines and said the fully justified figure was higher still, at Rs 1,912.
It is the consistency of exactly that account that the Authority now says it will test.
The political backdrop
Industries Minister Sunil Handunnetti said the government is ready to take on the question of the LAUGFS increase. Hiru reports the remark came during a contentious exchange prompted by a question Opposition Leader Sajith Premadasa put during Saturday’s budget debate about the scale of the rise.
The summons also follows legal action the Authority brought against the company over its failure to restore supply during the late-October shortage — a case that was already before the Colombo Magistrate’s Court before this month’s price revision.
Not reported
The filing does not say which executives have been summoned, whether the sitting is public, what powers the Authority proposes to use, or whether it can suspend or roll back the revision. It does not say whether LAUGFS submitted the increase to the Authority before applying it, which remains the central unanswered question from the original price filing. No response from the company to the summons is recorded.
Sourcing note
This article rests on a single verified newsroom. The Daily Mirror and NewsFirst rails carried no filing on the summons at the time of writing, and Ada Derana remains unreachable to this desk behind an HTTP 403 block. The price and cost figures above are corroborated by the Daily Mirror, NewsFirst, Hiru and Daily FT through the two linked articles; it is the summons itself that is single-sourced.