Sri Lanka Freedom Party set to face long legal battle in factional clash

Colombo: The Sri Lanka Freedom Party (SLFP) is set to get into a long legal battle this election year with separate factions trying to gain control of it as Nimal Siripala de Silva, an incumbent minister, was on Monday appointed the party's acting chairman in place of former president Maithripala Sirisena.

SLPP is one of the major and most well-known political parties in Sri Lanka which has ruled the island nation for many years.

“Today we took important decisions to carry out party functions without interruptions. The central committee meeting decided to elect an acting chair," Duminda Dissanayake, the party's national organiser, told the media.

Last week, Sirisena was clamped with a restraining order as the leader of the party after he dropped from party posts de Silva and two others, who are also ministers in President Ranil Wickremesinghe's government.

The trio has already obtained the court's interim orders suspending the action of Srisena, the 72-year-old former prime minister.

Following the restraining order on Sirisena, the police on Saturday shut the party headquarters after the Sirisena faction complained about the rival camp for allegedly stealing party files.

Sirisena after the court sanction against him accused former president Chandrika Kumaratunga of being behind the move to remove him as the leader.

The 78-year-old Kumaratunga was present at Monday morning’s meeting which appointed de Silva as the acting chair. The Sirisena faction told the media that Monday morning’s purported central committee meeting was illegal.

The SLFP, which contested the last parliamentary election held in 2020 under the SLPP banner, has 14 members in the 225-member Assembly.

Some of them are members of the Wickremesinghe government.

Sirisena claimed the trio defied the party whip, requiring them to remain in opposition.

The SLFP split comes as political parties are gearing up to face a presidential election in the last quarter of this year, with the next parliamentary polls falling due by mid-next year.