The Treasury will pay 8.5 billion rupees in compensation to 1,896 former Ceylon Electricity Board (CEB) employees who accepted a voluntary retirement package when the utility was unbundled into six state-owned successor companies, Energy Minister Anura Karunathilaka said on Monday.
“We have taken a decision to quickly pay this out of the Treasury,” Karunathilaka told reporters, according to EconomyNext.
The minister said employees of two of the six successor entities — the National System Operator (NSO) and the National Transmission Network Service Provider — will receive 50 percent of their compensation entitlement from the Treasury. Staff who moved to the other four companies will receive 100 percent of what they are owed, also funded by the Treasury.
The 1,896 workers now belong to the four operational successor entities: Electricity Distribution Lanka, Electricity Generation Lanka, the National Transmission Network Service Provider, and the National System Operator. The CEB was formally dissolved in March 2026 and replaced by six companies established under the new electricity industry framework.
The decision lands seven months after the dissolution and follows months of complaints. Retirees’ associations had publicly said for weeks that the promised payments had not arrived, with former employees first flagging non-payment in mid-April. Karunathilaka told Parliament on May 5 that the first half of the compensation would be paid by May 15, with the balance to follow.
CEB’s own January tariff filing had estimated the unbundling would cost about 10.6 billion rupees in lost economies of scale — a figure that has fed opposition criticism of the recent tariff revision that took effect this month.
Source: EconomyNext.
