AFP, Colombo :
Sri Lanka’s stock market halted trading after a nearly 13 per cent plunge Monday as the island nation’s beleaguered government faces new pressure to resign from influential Buddhist leaders over a crippling economic crisis.
The country’s worst downturn since independence in 1948 has brought widespread hardships to its 22 million people, with months of regular blackouts and acute shortages of food and fuel. Monday was the first morning of trade on the Colombo bourse after a two-week break, during which the government imposed a record interest rate hike and defaulted on its $51 billion foreign debt.
But trading was halted after a frenzied market sell-off, and called off for the day entirely when a brief resumption failed to dampen the downward slide, with the local S&P index finishing 12.6 per cent down.
Equities had already shed nearly 40 per cent of their value since January and the local currency has fallen by a similar amount against the greenback in the past month.
The latest market crash came as the country’s most influential Buddhist clerics joined a growing list of former allies calling for the government’s resignation.
“The country is fast becoming a failed state,” senior monk Medagama Dhammananda told reporters in the central city of Kandy.
Dhammananda said he and fellow Buddhist leaders had jointly petitioned President Gotabaya Rajapaksa to establish an interim government “to pull the country out of this crisis”.
Such a move would require the resignation of Prime Minister Mahinda Rajapaksa — the president’s brother and head of Sri Lanka’s powerful ruling family.
Gotabaya has faced similar calls to step down, with thousands of protesters camped outside his seafront office in Colombo for more than two weeks.
