City Life

Eric Ellis

21 July 2007

Peace would be a better business planfor the island of a hundred ministers

Flying into Colombo’s civil war on tourist-less Sri Lankan Airlines, my eye was caught by three plugs in the in-flight magazine from the country’s investment board: ‘Generous Fiscal Incentives’, ‘Transparent Legal System’, and ‘One of the Most Livable Countries in Asia’. The 70,000 who have died since 1983 in the former Ceylon’s intractable conflict between Tamils and Sinhalese would clearly disagree with the last one. But the praise for Sri Lanka’s rule of law provided pause for thought, since I had been summoned to a rural court deliberating the ownership of a property I bought here in 2003, a happier time when a fourth plug, ‘Liberal Business Environment’, was briefly true. It’s a gorgeous plot that two fishermen now claim is theirs. Our titles prove conclusively otherwise — but I’ve had to instruct two lawyers, the second to shadow the treacherous first who we suspect of colluding with the fishermen. He was ‘too busy’ to brief me when our case inexplicably flared up in April, but not too busy to bank the retainer I stupidly paid him, 50 times what he charges Sri Lankans, before his chicanery was rumbled and the matter sorted.

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