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	Jeyanesan Charged with Sexual Attack Further Remanded Sri Lanka Watch August 18, 2009 http://srilankawatch.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=108&Itemid=1 We understand from our reporters from the Eastern Province town of Batticaloa, that the Rev Sellathurai Jeyanesan head of the Church of the American Ceylon Mission arrested August 8 for sexual harassment of a teenager who was living in an orphanage run by him, and produced in courts Monday August 17, has been further remanded for another two weeks. From Ivan Alvapillai in Colombo We understand from our reporters from the Eastern Province town of Batticaloa, that the Rev Sellathurai Jeyanesan head of the Church of the American Ceylon Mission arrested August 8 for sexual harassment of a teenager who was living in an orphanage run by him, and produced in courts Monday August 17, has been further remanded for another two weeks. Ever since his arrest, complaints are said to be pouring in about a number of incidents where the Rev Mr Jeyanesan has been accused of improper behavior towards female children and young girls. Although accusations have been made against him on several occasions before, the Rev Mr Jeyanesan was said to have overcome them in various ways and one of them by having the police on his side. If indeed this is true, it may be time that the government appoints a commission to investigate how the police are being used by certain people to abuse the justice system in the country. If young girls can be sexually attacked in the community and the police turn a blind eye, they having been sufficiently compensated with money or by certain sordid and disgusting services especially by exploiting innocent children, then we have an obligation to go into the root of the matter. Rev Jeyanesan has not submitted his accounts from funds raised overseas in the name of the Jaffna Diocese of the Church of South India from which he had split and they could run into several millions. He has managed this for nearly ttwenty years. All these were raised, as he claimed, for work among children over which there was never any supervision. He managed and conducted himself in a state where he had total control over helpless children. He even had overseas elder visitors especially from the Netherlands and they had all the freedom to be among the kids without any supervision. Although this exercise brought funds for the Rev Jeyanesan, he never cared for the interests of the children. A Dutch non-academic organization even conferred a doctorate on him; all bogus. Now with the arrest of this priest, a barrel of worms may have cracked open. We have lessons to learn and among them no orphanage should ever be under the governance of a lone operator especially gathering funds from overseas. All orphanages should operate under the local community and they should have foster parents facilities provided by dedicated people. All of Rev Jeyanesan’s activities, his overseas fund collection missions, investments both in Sri Lanka and overseas especially in Canada and those who participated with him must be fully investigated and brought to public knowledge. Among his properties in Canada, he has a luxury condo and his son runs around in a sports car. Involved in these may be large sums of funds that never belonged to him but appropriated by him in devious ways. We understand he has a committee in Colombo that has helped him to split with the JDCSI and form a church, the legality of which has been challenged and there is already an interim order against the name American Ceylon Mission, a property of the JDCSI, being used. He has overlooked this order and thereby insulted the court order, a distinct case of contempt. We tried to contact the head of this committee, a Mrs Vasanti Rajaratnam of Wellawatte, but were told she was out of the country. Our next effort was to talk to Rev Jeyanesan’s deputy, the Rev Annappah Jeyakumar in Jaffna but he refused to comment on the arrest and remand of the Rev Jeyanesan. The Rev Jeyakumar was recently reported to have fraudulently encashed a one million rupee cheque from funds belonging to the Jaffna Christian Union. This was not the first time he had been found out with such an activity. Earlier he helped himself to some Swiss funds meant for an orphanage. Associated with him is his brother-in-law G Rajanayagam a former principal of Jaffna College who managed an orphanage funded by a German organization showing false accounts and also bills from a grocery shop that never existed. He also overstated the numbers in that orphanage to the principals in Germany by four times the actual number of orphans. In another case of a home for abused women in Uduvil, he was found to have conducted himself improperly and was relieved of his responsibility. A former head of the church once commented he had to keep a midnight watch on the door of this ex-principal to make sure there were no improper callers, especially his house being situated in the school campus. This followed a rather embarrassing incident he himself had when he stayed for a night in the guest room of the principal’s bungalow. It was, he said, beyond him to serve the demands of the caller. This same ex-principal once physically attacked a senior and much respected journalist for a feature that appeared in the daily SUN of Colombo on abused children. The feature had no reference to him in any way but he claimed at the Vaddukoddai junction one evening that it was all about him. The journalist was a member of the school's Board of Directors but the gutless board members turned blind and deaf to the incident. Until four years ago, such people had dominance in the community but the new leadership has gone for a full scale clean up and some of the offenders have even left the country fearing accountability for their sins of omissions and commissions. Strangely, these offenders of public morals and ethics seem to be enjoying the support of the United Church of Christ Wider Church Ministries in Cleveland, Ohio and the Trustees of Jaffna College Funds, a fiduciary trust. While it should work with the Board of Directors of Jaffna College, it seems determined to work with others most of whose integrity is suspect. Their activities over the years have been cast in the mist of dense opaqueness and turn arrogant and vicious if their conduct is questioned. Evidently these two organizations seem to have much to cover up.
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