$500 MILLION IN SRI LANKA TSUNAMI AID "MISSING"

Over $500 million in tsunami aid given to Sri Lanka has gone "missing," an anti-corruption organization has charged.

Transparency International Sri Lanka (TISL) said its investigations had revealed a gap between the amounts disbursed by foreign aid agencies and what has been spent on relief and recovery projects since the 2004 tsunami.

"The difference between the disbursed and the expended (amounts) has been a controversial issue that does not have a credible explanation," said TISL in a statement released to mark the third anniversary of the disaster. "There is no precise evidence to explain the missing sum of [about $535 million]."

The government, however, has consistently said its recovery program has been a notable success. Government spokesman and Information Minister Anura Priyadarshana Yapa said last week that Sri Lanka had performed better than other tsunami-stricken nations, and that there had been "an overall 80 percent success" rate.

According to figures TISL said it obtained earlier this year from the Development Assistance Database (DAD) -- an official website which tracks tsunami aid inflows -- donor agencies gave about $1.2 billion (having initially pledged about twice as much).

Of this approximately $1.2 billion, the amount spent on tsunami projects is about $685 million, according to the DAD.

TISL said it had reason to believe that some of the funds "have been utilized by the government for other purposes," but did not elaborate on to what these "other purposes" might have been.

A government official overseeing tsunami recovery dismissed the allegations: She said the figures were misleading because they were entered into the database by bilateral and multilateral agencies themselves.

"The government has no check on what figures have been entered into the database because the donors enter the figures themselves," Shanthi Fernando, a presidential adviser on post-tsunami reconstruction and rehabilitation affairs, told IRIN. "This is not money that the government has received directly."

TISL said there had been no government audit of tsunami aid since an interim report issued in 2005. "Thus, the overall picture on finances is ambiguous and left for speculation," its statement said.

However, presidential adviser Fernando said individual ministries which had undertaken tsunami projects had conducted their own financial reviews and, as such, there was no need for the government to conduct an additional review.

Among the other issues raised by TISL were political interference in the allotting of housing and allegations of corruption against village level officials which have yet to be investigated. "Large-scale reconstruction processes... need a system to receive complaints relating to corruption," TISL said, recommending that the government establish a formal complaints procedure.