Sri Lanka's Ports and Shipping industry does not require any government handouts, as the world is attempting to come out of the economic slump, brought on by the COVID-19 pandemic, Chief Executive Officer of the South Asia Gateway Terminals, Romesh David stated.

"The government has announced that they have a Rs.50 billion package. They probably need Rs.500 billion in order to restart the various different economies. At this point, I don’t think Sri Lanka's ports and shipping industry need any handouts now.  There is no necessity for any government handouts. The port industry has already at the request of the government given a huge amount of relief to importers over 30 days because storage on the port is the most expensive storage in the world and we have already waived almost 40 days of storage facilitating importers. But I think what the government can do is to make sure that from a policy perspective they get things , do things and make things easier for business," he said whilst speaking to Indeewari Amuwatte @HydePark on Ada Derana 24.

Further, he also expressed the following;

"From 1977 onwards every government in power wanted to make Sri Lanka a maritime hub and let’s face it. We are a decent container shipping hub. We are good. But, being a maritime hub is a far cry from being just a container shipping hub. We have to leverage the fact that we are a great container shipping hub and then take it to the next level. We got to add things like bunkering, crew changing, inviting people to set up their regional offices here. So there are a whole raft of stuff that we have to take from being just a container transshipment hub to being a maritime hub."

"We have to realize that we are no different to any other country that is trying to attract investment. We are no different to Malaysia, we are no different to Singapore and we are no different to Vietnam. We should encourage people to come and invest here. Singapore started. Dubai started. We have these great examples of the success of having investment led hub economies. There is nothing to recreate.We just simply copy. We emulate what has happened there and we must make that policy transcend the political change. There has to be acceptance across the political spectrum that this is where we want to be, this is what we want to do in terms of our hub and irrespective of who comes into power these are the things that we will implement going forward," he said.