Minister Wasantha Samarasinghe says that his assets and liabilities are stated as Rs. 275 million in his assets and liabilities declarations, and that they are those that he inherited from his family and that he has increased by doing business. He said this while participating in a program on the Siyatha television channel.
Commenting on his earnings, he said the following.
”When I gave the assets and liabilities declaration, I said that Thambuttegama is our village. Everyone in Thambuttegama knows us, our family also knows us. We came to Colombo from Thambuttegama, completed our degrees at the University of Kelaniya and are doing politics – some people think that those who are doing politics with the JVP are doing nothing but politics. You are asking us a question about how we can survive without taking a salary. While we are doing politics, we also have management. I have a lot of property that I got from my family,
I started teaching classes in 1997. When I started, I would come to the University of Kelaniya, come and go for a few days, but I would continue to teach. After I started working for the Inter-University Students’ Federation, I could not teach. I started a class. We have a piece of land in Thambuttegama town for that. We built a coconut tree on this land, my friends from the university came first, when we started, we built benches on coconut trees and that’s how the class started. That history is now more than 28 years.
Since then, we have built a coconut tree roof, a sheet roof, I have moved to concrete, and currently it is one of the largest buildings in Thambuttegama. Now I have rented it out. A large number of classes are held. Ordinary Level, Advanced Level, vocational training, all of these. Now, a perch here in Thambuttegama town goes for about 30 lakhs. This land is a land that has been ours since our generation. There is a piece of about 40 perches here, and there are two pieces.
The three-storey commercial building is that class. It has roofs of about 7500 square feet. There are two solar panels. There is another solar panel that has been in place for more than five months now. I have not even paid the company that built it yet. These are not the ones that came about by chance in one day. That other building is the one near our main house. It is in the middle of Thambuttegama town. I started working on it by taking a loan from RDB. Later, a businessman bought it. Later, we took another loan and built it to four floors. This was not a journey that I came to alone. It came little by little. Today, the value of that building is 225 million.
I bought a pound in 2006 for 6500 rupees. Now a pound is 300,000 rupees. Their value is increasing. They are now worth a lot when you calculate them today. The value of that land will also increase in the future. They will be for my child after me. I can say this because I have said it, I have not hidden it.”