In an excruciating day of evidence at the Bond Commission, lawyers defending Perpetual Treasuries and their employees shamelessly watched on as the CEO Kasun Palisena compulsively lied.

The Commissioners who couldn’t take anymore of the blatant lying said that It was clear that Palisena was lying. “At least make your lies believable” Justice Prasanna Jayawardena told Palisena.

Perpetual CEO Kasun Palisena

All throughout, Kalinga Indathissa, Anuja Premarathne, Nihal Fernando and the rest of the Defense Counsel watched on.

Recording after recording was played by the Attorney Generals Department which showed that Palisena had known that the phone recordings was identifiable. Earlier Palisena said that the recordings could not be identified. However later testimony showed that Palisena was lying and that he instructed to crash the computer with recordings at the behest of Arjun Aloysius.

Grudgingly Palisena was made to admit that Arjun Aloysius lied to the COPE committee regarding his involvement with PTL, after it was made clear that he was the main decision maker of the company.

Palisenas deleted phone recordings also put forth a “Little Jonny” codename, to whom kickbacks were paid.

Palisena compulseively lying refused to budge an inch all the time saying he did not know the Little Jhonny who was referred to in the conversation, which was in reference to a payment called for by Arjun Aloysius.

The evidence became so laughable at a point during which an agitated ASG Milinda Gunathilake said you are an unrepentant liar.

When asked about his instructions to delete the phone recordings, Palisena said that he was not aware of anything of the sort, instead he threw his subordinates Nuwan Salgado and Sachithra Dewathanthri under the bus. He said it was they who lied when giving evidence. They said that they were instructed by Kasun Paliisena to delete the phone calls.

Throughout the evidence today, Palisena made valiant attempts to protect Aloysius, only grudgingly admitting that Aloysius was the person ultimately responsible.

During testimony, the Commission also pointed out that Palisena had received bonuses running over “9 digits”.

Throughout the entire testimony, Palisena compulsively lied at the end drawing the laughter of the lawyers and people present each time he lied.

At one instance the ASG played a call recording, one of over 550 call recordings for the day in question, in which Palisena calls another dealer and speaks of “deleting calls” during a Central Bank onsite examination.

Later during the testimony he denied knowledge of how the computer system crashed on the very same day the company received a letter from the Central Bank, on July 6th 2017.

Throughout it all Defense Lawyers silently watched as Palisena lied and lied again to protect his “boss”, so much so that the Commission Chairman K.T. Chihtrasiri told him “please stop this, just tell us the truth”.