Sri Lankan President to Resign on July 13, News Aggregator Says Citing Parliament Speaker

On Saturday, an emergency meeting of the leaders of political parties chaired by Speaker of the Sri Lankan Parliament Mahinda Yapa Abeywardena was held in the wake of mass protests

NEW DELHI, July 9. /TASS/. Sri Lanka’s President Gotabaya Rajapaksa will step down on July 13, the NewsWire news aggregator said on Saturday citing Speaker Mahinda Yapa Abeywardena.

According to NewsWire, Rajapaksa has informed that he will resign on July 13.

On Saturday, an emergency meeting of the leaders of political parties chaired by Speaker of the Sri Lankan Parliament Mahinda Yapa Abeywardena was held in the wake of mass protests. The participants in the meeting agreed that incumbent President Gotabaya Rajapaksa and Prime Minister Ranil Wickremesinghe should resign and that the speaker of the parliament should take over as provisional president for no longer than 30 days. Sri Lanka’s parliament will elect president for the remaining term. Additionally, the meeting ruled to appoint a provisional all-party government and to hold elections in the near future.

Earlier in the day, thousands of protesters took to the streets of Colombo, demanding Rajapaksa’s resignation. They stormed his residence and then the prime minister’s residence Temple Trees, which they later set it on fire. Over 30 people were injured in the protests. Wickremesinghe announced amid the riots that he would step down.

The protests sparked by financial and economic crises have engulfed the country since early April. As Wickremesinghe told TASS in an exclusive interview, Sri Lanka is hit hard by the worst crisis in modern history, and the island nation’s politicians cannot yet find parallels to such a crisis in this century or in the last century or the century before. According to the prime minister, the country is currently in the middle of the crisis.

Wickremesinghe pointed out that Sri Lanka was facing severe shortages of foreign currencies, fuel and petroleum products, fertilizers, food for some groups of the population, and medicines. According to his estimates, it will take three years or even more to recover from the economic crisis.

Protesters storm Sri Lanka’s presidential residence, says agency

Head of the state Gotabaya Rajapaksa managed to leave the residence minutes before demonstrators got to its territory, a defense ministry source said

MOSCOW, July 9. /TASS/. Protesters have broken into Sri Lankan President Gotabaya Rajapaksa’s residence, Agence France-Presse (AFP) reported on Saturday citing local TV.

Head of the state managed to leave the residence minutes before demonstrators got to its territory, a defense ministry source said. Rajapaksa is still considered the country’s president and he is currently protected by the military, the same source told the agency.

Since early April, Sri Lanka has been hit by protests against the deteriorating living conditions, the lack of fuel, food and essentials. Sri Lanka is experiencing its worst economic crisis since independence in 1948. It resulted from a contraction of foreign tourism due to the pandemic, which led to the shortage of foreign currency reserves in the country. In this environment the authorities were forced to cut imports and introduce tight resource saving. The country’s external debt, which totals $51 bln, hinders Sri Lanka from making external borrowings and struggling against the economic crisis.