Lanka's financial reporting standard high - ICASL President

There is tremendous opportunity for Sri Lanka to be a financial hub and is important that we create confidence among foreign investors in all aspects to ensure the stability of our financial industry, PricewaterhouseCoopers Partner and ICASL President Sujeewa Mudalige said.

Sujeewa Mudalige

Speaking at the Learning's from the Global Financial Crisis for Sri Lanka seminar organized by the Merchant Bank of Sri Lanka recently, he said Sri Lanka is upto the level of international accounting standards.

"But it has not been fully converted. However, the country is keen on achieving global accounting standards like International Financial Reporting Standards (IFRS) by next year," he said.

"The entire world went through a double dip crisis during the past two years and many strong economies are still struggling to recover from it. However Asia managed to continue the growing momentum, while China and India becoming much stronger and Sri Lanka could also be a part of the Asian growth".

"It is crucial that all stakeholders get together to address systemic risks before we have another adversity like in year 2008. The Central Bank as the regulator of the financial industry has shown a remarkable improvement in the recent past".

Mudalige said the Central Bank intervened to protect some of the financial institutions mainly due to related party instructions, greed and poor governance and mismatches of assets and liabilities. "If the Central Bank did not act fast the entire banking industry would have collapsed," he said.

"Acting fast when a company is in distress along with good governance, diversification, importance of liquidity, preparing to be changed according to the environmental changes, changed regulation, improvements in auditor skepticism and rating agencies being responsible for their ratings are some of the key lessons that can be learnt not to repeat mistakes in the financial industry". CdeS