Sri Lanka speaker defies president as MP tells of defection cash offer

COLOMBO: Sri Lanka’s speaker Friday summoned parliament to meet next week in defiance of the president as a constitutional crisis darkened with an MP saying he was offered millions of dollars and a minister’s post to defect to a rival camp.

With the Indian Ocean nation torn between rival prime ministers Ranil Wickremesinghe and Mahinda Rajapakse, speaker Karu Jayasuriya said he could no longer ignore demands for parliament to meet to end the week-old feud. Amid growing international concern over the standoff, Jayasuriya convened parliament to meet next Wednesday. President Maithripala Sirisena suspended parliament until November 16 after sacking Wickremesinghe as premier and replacing him with former authoritarian president Rajapakse. Wickremesinghe has refused to accept the dismissal and remained bunkered at the prime minister’s official residence for the past week amid nearly daily twists in the saga.

Sirisena at first lifted the suspension, but with observers saying his candidate Rajapakse did not have enough support to win a parliamentary vote, the president’s party said late Thursday that the assembly would remain shut. “The speaker met a majority of MPs at a committee room today and promised he will open parliament on November 7,” Jayasuriya’s spokesman told AFP.

Some 118 of the 225 lawmakers attended the meeting in a new sign that Sirisena would not win a vote on Rajapakse, whose decade as president up to 2015 was marked by the brutal end of the Tamil civil war and corruption claims. Wickremesinghe and his allies are confident they can prove a majority. But intense behind-the-scenes lobbying to tempt defectors surged into the open on Friday. A senior member of Wickremesinghe’s United National Party, Range Bandara, said he was offered $2.8 million and a ministry to switch sides and would go to the anti-graft commission. “I have a phone recording of a former minister in the Rajapakse camp trying to approach me,” Bandara told reporters.