The government will not hand over flats awarded under the Gedhoruveriya scheme after disregarding a report shared by the Anti-Corruption Commission (ACC), President’s Office Chief Spokesperson Heena Waleed said yesterday.
Speaking at a press conference at the President’s Office, Heena said any decision taken after disregarding the report would violate the rights of unsuccessful applicants for the flats as well as the chosen recipients of the flats.
The ACC report raised issues of concern and the government will try to resolve the problem to ensure the fairest outcome, Heena said.
“After all the concerns were revealed in the ACC report, for us to disregard the report and decide otherwise would deprive those who didn’t get the flats as well as those who got the flats of their rights,” Heena said.
Earlier on Monday, Parliament passed a resolution calling on the government to hand over the flats awarded through the previous government’s Gedhoruveriya scheme without any additions or omissions to the list of recipients.
After investigating complaints about the flat list earlier this year, the ACC concluded that most of the recipients did not meet the eligibility criteria.
The percentage of application forms from the final list found to be eligible without any issues was 20.7 percent and the percentage of forms that met the criteria but contained problems was 19.7 percent.
Most of the forms that met the criteria but contained problems included conflicting information. That was 70 percent of the total forms. There were also forms with problems in the awarding of points and forms with points awarded against the evaluation rules for the category of disabled applicants.
The government is currently reviewing the list.
After the evaluation of submissions under the scheme, a provisional list released on August 8 last year included 15,046 applicants who were deemed eligible. The previous government decided to provide flats to all eligible applicants. However, construction had only started on 4,000 flats at the time.
The government decided to hand over the first 4,000 flats to applicants who scored the highest points. But the ACC ordered a halt to the process over a complaint submitted to the commission. After investigating the case upon securing access to the online submission portal created for the scheme, the commission authorized the process to resume on February 1.
