Independent Assurance Report to the management of Commercial Bank of Ceylon PLC on the Sustainability Report-2011

Introduction and scope of the engagement

The management of Commercial Bank of Ceylon PLC (“Bank”) engaged us to provide an independent assurance on the following elements of the Sustainability Report 2011 (“the Report”)

Reasonable assurance on the information on financial performance and whether the Bank has obtained external independent assurance on the GRI application level.
Limited assurance on other information presented in the Report.

Managements’ responsibility for the Report

The management of the Bank is responsible for the preparation and presentation of the Report in accordance with the Bank’s sustainability practices and policies some of which are derived from Global Reporting Initiatives (GRI-G3.1) Sustainability Reporting Guidelines. The GRI-G3.1 guidelines are publicly available at GRI’s global website at “www.globalreporting.org”. These responsibilities include among other things, identification of stakeholders and material issues, determining the sustainable performance criteria for reporting and establishing appropriate processes and internal control systems to measure and report the sustainability performance criteria.

Ernst & Young’s responsibility

Our responsibility is to perform a reasonable and limited assurance engagement and express conclusions based on the work performed in accordance with Sri Lanka Standard on Assurance Engagements (SLSAE 3000): ‘Assurance Engagements other than Audits or Reviews of Historical Financial Information’, issued by the Institute of Chartered Accountants of Sri Lanka (“ICASL”).

Reasonable assurance is a high level of assurance. However, reasonable assurance is not an absolute level of assurance because there are inherent limitations of an assurance engagement.

A limited assurance engagement is substantially less in scope than a reasonable assurance engagement and consequently does not enable to obtain assurance that we would become aware of all significant matters that might be identified in a reasonable assurance engagement.

This Report is made solely to the Bank in accordance with our engagement letter dated February 13, 2012. We disclaim any assumption of responsibility for any reliance on this report to any person other than the Bank or for any purpose other than that for which it was prepared. In conducting our engagement, we have complied with the independence requirements of the Code for Ethics for Professional Accountants issued by the ICASL.

Key assurance procedures

Financial information

We reconciled the information on financial performance with the audited financial statements of the Bank for the years ended December 31, 2007, 2008, 2009, 2010 and 2011.
Check the other assurance reports, declarations provided by external assurance providers.

Other information

We planned and performed following assurance procedures on other information presented in the Report:

Interviewing relevant Bank’s personnel to understand the process for collection, analysis, aggregation and presentation of information in the Report
Review the systems used to generate, aggregate and report the information in the Report
Interview with the senior management and relevant staff at corporate level and selected business unit level and obtain the evidence concerning the sustainability strategy and policies for material issues and implementation of those across the operation of the Bank
Reviewing and validating the information contained in the Report
Checking the calculations performed by the Bank on a sample basis through recalculation
Reading the information presented in the Report to determine whether that information is in line with our overall knowledge of, and experience with, sustainability performance of the Bank.

Conclusions

Based on the procedures performed, as described above, we conclude that

The information on financial performance is properly derived from the audited financial statements of the Bank for the years ended December 31, 2007, 2008, 2009, 2010 and 2011 and the independent assurance statement provided by Det Norske Veritas AS (DNV) confirmed that the Bank met the GRI application level ‘B+’.
Nothing has come to our attention that causes us to believe that other information presented in the Report are not presented, in all material respects, in accordance with the Bank’s sustainability practices and policies some of which are derived from GRI (G3.1) Sustainability Reporting Guidelines.

Chartered Accountants
February 27, 2012
Colombo