Central Bank rejects S&P claims

The Central Bank said yesterday that claims by Standard and Poor's credit rating agency about the country's fiscal indicators were totally wrong and misleading.

"This is completely a wrong and weak analysis, without analysing the data properly," Nandalal Weerasinghe, the chief economist and director of the economic research department at the Central Bank told Thomson Reuters. "At the beginning of the year we completely objected to their analysis, because they never came here, never had discussion with us.

They are sitting in Singapore and looking at various headline numbers and then give us the rating.

"Our point is that since they rated us in 2005/06, our indicators have been improving," Weerasinghe said.

"We have been tightening both fiscal and monetary policies both last year and this year. Even the International Monetary Fund (IMF) recently recognised the fact that monetary and fiscal policies contributed to only less than 16 percent of the inflation in Sri Lanka," Weerasinghe added.