Sri Lanka express it’s deepest condolence to the families that were affected by the earthquake in Italy.

Mr. Chair, thank you for the opportunity givento Sri Lanka for its intervention. Let me begin by congratulating you for your appointment to chair this important meeting. Please accept the appreciation of the Sri Lankan delegation of the preparatory notes and the unstinted support of the Secretariat during the meeting for their excellent work.

Sri Lanka is in its incubatory state in taking action to recover its assets that are in overseas territories.

Today we heard from many state representative the difficulties faced by them to recover the assets using the available tools. We the Sri Lanka delegation wish to agree with those delegates in the difficulties faced during practical enforcement. We see many countries having explicit documents setting out their MLA laws. Sri Lanka has sent over 30 MLA requests globally during 2015 and over 20 FIU request. Often we do not even receive a letter of acknowledgement from the receiving country.. Out of the 30 we only received the required successful responses only in 5 MLA requests. We had at times personally flown to those countries requesting for corporation but without avail. We in Sri Lanka with our practical experience sees MLA and FIU as tools that is ineffective to recover proceeds of crime.

The recover process has two main steps. The investigation stage and recovers stage. The distinguish delegate of Alegeria explained Short term approach and long term approach of recovery of asset. We fully endorse those views.

We in Sri Lanka wish to urge UNODC to develop some tools apart from MLA and fIUrequests to recover information during investigations, stage. That is short term approaches during investigations. Especially some tools to obtain details of Bank records during investigations.

Sri Lanka appreciate and endorse the simplified process expounded by the Switzerland for international corporation.
The Sri Lanka delegation reiterate its request and urge the UNODC to please identify other less cumbersome tools and to continuously develop such tools to assist in the recovery of proceeds of crime.

Finally in concluding, we thank for the opportunity given to the Sri Lankan delegation to express our views.