MONETABRIEF – Former President Maithripala Sirisena carried out a mini-Cabinet reshuffle in 2017 to address a serious management problem at Lake House, the state-owned publishing company, according to one of those involved.
Krishantha Cooray, the then chairman of Hotel Developers, the company that owns the Colombo Hilton property, had been asked by then Prime Minister Ranil Wickremesinghe to take on the additional responsibility of running Lake House, but he flatly refused.
Cooray said he would accept only if Foreign Minister Mangala Samaraweera were appointed Minister of Media, as he was one of the few Cabinet ministers with whom Cooray could work, according to a linkedin.com post.
Convention dictated that a Foreign Minister, with his frequent overseas travel, could not hold the Media portfolio, which required a hands-on approach.
Paying tribute to Samaraweera on the fifth anniversary of his death, Cooray said he thought he had an ironclad excuse for staying away from Lake House because he never thought that Prime Minister Wickremesinghe or President Sirisena would agree to move Samaraweera from the Foreign Ministry to the Treasury, with additional responsibility for the Media portfolio. However, at Wickremesinghe’s request, Sirisena ordered the change.
At the time, few people knew the reason for President Sirisena’s sudden Cabinet reshuffle – effectively, a swap of portfolios between Samaraweera and Ravi Karunanayake.
Writing on his LinkedIn page, Cooray said the Prime Minister had asked him to persuade Samaraweera to take up the Finance portfolio. However, Samaraweera was initially opposed.
He said even his mother had told him that he could not manage his own finances. How, then, could he be entrusted with the state coffers? Some of his relatives had also advised him against giving up the Foreign Ministry.
However, senior Treasury officials later spoke of Samaraweera as one of the better Finance Ministers they had worked with.
Lake House is an institution founded by Wickremesinghe’s maternal grandfather, D. R. Wijewardene, and later nationalised in 1973 under the government of Sirima Bandaranaike. (Colombo/Aug23/2026)