Colombo, 2/4: Sri Lanka President Gotabaya Rajapaksa Friday declared a state of emergency giving security forces sweeping powers a day after hundreds of people tried to storm his residence amid an unprecedented economic crisis.
But the current crisis was accelerated by deep tax cuts promised by Rajapaksa during a 2019 election campaign that were enacted months before the Covid-19 pandemic, which wiped out parts of Sri Lanka’s economy.
With the country’s lucrative tourism industry and foreign workers’ remittances sapped by the pandemic, credit ratings agencies moved to downgrade Sri Lanka and effectively locked it out of international capital markets.