They issued shares to their own membership, raised funds as bulk loans from development banks, retailed such funds among members, undertook various economic enterprises, provided quick loans to membership at affordable market interest rates and maintained accounts in terms of more stringent Sri Lanka Accounting Standards and met all the statutory requirements of getting accounts audited by qualified chartered accountants and holding annual general meetings 26 . When the Central Bank was convinced that the people’s companies had the required maturity, exposure and experience to run the Isuru Project on its own under the Bank’s general guidance and supervision, a decision was made to hand over the district level project activities on a phased-out basis to the people’s companies. This unwinding operation began in 2007 and is planned to be completed by 2010. The objective of this strategy has been for the Central Bank to withdraw from the project gradually and allow the beneficiaries who are now matured and seasoned micro financiers to run their own businesses. The first two years of power transfer has been completed successfully. All the People’s Companies have begun their operations on a sound financial footing. The recruitment of their own staff to run the operations has already commenced. The encouraging early signs foretell that the sustainability of the project has now been formally established. Part III Forward sale contract system: a mechanism to ensure price stability in agricultural produce A perennial problem faced by farmers world throughout has been the wide fluctuation of prices of agricultural produce between seasons.
Where we draw the line within that for being in scope of this initial first step of the strong and simple framework will impact the extent of simplification we can achieve while maintaining strong standards. There is also the risk that simplifying requirements for smaller firms could increase barriers to growth, if the step up to the next level of our framework is too big. That being said, we could in the long run move to a graduated approach that covers all nonsystemic firms. Under such a regime the complexity of the framework would grow 2/5  BIS central bankers' speeches  commensurately with the size and complexity of a firm’s activities, minimising potentially steep barriers to growth. This is in fact the long-term vision we have outlined in our paper. But doing this will take time and, rather than delaying the roll-out of a simpler framework for everyone, we thought a better approach would be to do this step-by-step. One possible first step is to start with the smallest firms that would benefit the most from a radically simpler regime – but, as with all the trade-offs in our paper, this is something we would welcome views on. We also need to consider the position of foreign banks that operate in the UK. Internationally active firms will continue to be in scope of international standards; likewise, it may be appropriate for subsidiaries of international groups to stick with the international standards. But we have an open mind on this.