By Shiran Ranasinghe
Paddy stocks worth billions of rupees in storage facilities owned by the Paddy Marketing Board (PMB) have vanished during the last decade, reports by the Auditor General have revealed.A senior PMB officer said about 20 percent of total paddy stored in the last decade had disappeared.
The Auditor General has also found that the financial reports of the PMB have been consistently unreliable and that the institution has not taken a physical stock of the paddy held in their storage units.
The Auditor General’s reports state that the weight of the paddy collected from the farmers might drop while in storage due to the loss of moisture in the paddy during the storage period, damage due to insects and other factors.Even after taking these factors into consideration, there was no way of explaining how about 20 percent of the total stock vanished, the senior officer said.
The Auditor General’s reports have also revealed that line ministers sold the PMB paddy to their henchmen below the purchase prices. PMB management had not made any attempts to recover the cost over the years.
Chairman of the PMD, Buddhika Iddamalgoda said that he had been appointed only three weeks before.There are 21 Auditor General’s reports on the PMD and he would go through all reports, Iddamalgoda said. “I will respond before 31 December. We have purchased paddy amounting to 810 million rupees this season. We have 7,070 metric tons and we expect to make two billion rupees by selling them. I agree that we need to take a physical stock of what is in our stores,” he said.