By Secrets of the Cemetery: The 30-Year Funeral Scam That Nobody Stopped!
Colombo’s funeral scene just got a whole lot more dramatic! Imagine this—a funeral parlour operating illegally for over 30 years right inside the Borella General Cemetery, all while the authorities turned a blind eye. Sounds like a plot from a crime thriller, doesn’t it? But nope, this is real life, and the Colombo Municipal Council (CMC) is finally waking up to the scandal.
It all started in 1994, when a CMC employee decided to set up his own unauthorised funeral business—right on council-owned land! No licence, no approvals, just sheer nerve. And if you’re wondering how he got away with it, well, it turns out he had some seriously good forgery skills. He even registered his illegal operation as a company with the Registrar of Companies. Talk about commitment!
But the real question is: How did this go unnoticed for three decades?
MP Aravinda Senarath, who chairs the Committee on Public Accounts (COPA), was just as baffled as the rest of us when this juicy piece of corruption came to light. He grilled officials on how an unlicensed funeral parlour had been running for so long—without even an environmental licence!
And guess what? The former Municipal Commissioner of Colombo claimed she had been threatened for trying to shut down the operation! Apparently, the man behind the scam had been changing the business name frequently to avoid detection. And the damage? A staggering Rs. 41 million loss for the CMC.
COPA has now ordered the immediate closure of the funeral parlour (finally!) and is pushing for legal action against the mastermind behind it. But here’s the real tea—could he have pulled this off alone? Officials suspect there were others helping him from the inside.
With the Western Province Chief Secretary given just two weeks to submit a full report, we might finally see some names getting exposed.
