New CBSL Monetary Board members appointed

Sanjeeva Jayawardena, President’s Counsel was appointed as a Member of the Monetary Board of the CBSL with effect from 26.02.2020 and Dr Ranee Jayamaha and Samantha Kumarasinghe were appointed as Members of the Monetary Board with effect from 29.06.2020.

Sanjeeva Jayawardena is the first President’s Counsel to serve on the Monetary Board of the CBSL.

He presently serves as the Chairman of the Monetary Board Risk Oversight Committee and has also been appointed as the Chairman of the Ethics Committee of the CBSL.

Sanjeeva Jayawardena PC, has been practicing exclusively in the Supreme Court and the Court of Appeal for the last 27 years, having been called to the Bar in 1992.

He was thereafter conferred Silk, as President’s Counsel, in the year 2012.

He specialises in all aspects of Appellate law, as well as Constitutional and Public Law and has a varied practice in diverse fields and subjects, including civil, contractual, commercial, property, taxation, banking and other disciplines of the law.

Dr Jayamaha has more than 45 years of extensive national and international experience in macro and monetary economics, central banking, regulation and supervision, payment systems, including e-money deployment and financial inclusion.

She was a career central banker who served the CBSL for nearly 38 years, retiring in 2009 as the Deputy Governor in-charge of financial system stability.

She was instrumental in modernizing the payment systems and automating the accounting and reporting systems of the CBSL.

During her tenure at the CBSL, she served (on secondment) as the Secretary to the Presidential Commission on Finance and Banking, Advisor to the Ministry of Finance and Special Advisor (Economic) at the Commonwealth Secretariat, London, UK.

Samantha Kumarasinghe currently serves as Chairman and Managing Director of several companies in Sri Lanka, Bangladesh and Vietnam that operate in industrial sectors across cosmetics, textile chemicals, household cleaning products, organic food and biological fertilizers.

He currently serves as a member of the Presidential Task Force for Economic Revival and Poverty Eradication (2020), President of Lanka Industry Forum for Empowerment (LIFE) (2018 to date) and Chairman of Cosmetics Sector Advisory Committee at the Ministry of Industries (2016 to date).

He has also served in the capacities of member of Presidential Industrialization Commission (from 2018 to 2019), a board member of the Insurance Board of Sri Lanka (2012 to 2014), a committee member of the Implementation of the Integrated Curriculum, Subjects and Review of Academic Activities Process of the Ministry of Education (2013) and as Commissioner of the Presidential Taxation Commission (2009 to 2010).