Introduction

We were engaged by the Board of Directors of Commercial Bank of Ceylon PLC (“the Bank”) to provide assurance on the following elements of the Sustainability Reporting incorporated in this Integrated Annual Report 2013 (“Report”) for the year ended December 31, 2013:

• Reasonable assurance on the data on financial performance, as reported under the Financial Review of this Report.
• Limited assurance on Key Sustainability Reporting Indicators (“KPI”).

Managements’ Responsibilities and the Criteria Applied

Management is responsible for the preparation and presentation of the Report in accordance with this GRI Sustainability Reporting Guidelines as described under Reporting Parameters of this Report and the information and assertions contained within it: for determining the Bank’s objectives in respect of sustainable development performance and reporting, including the identification of stakeholder and material issues, and for establishing and maintaining appropriate performance management and internal control systems from which the reported performance information is derived.

Our Responsibilities and Compliance with SLSAE 3000

Our responsibility is to carry out a reasonable and limited assurance engagement and to express a conclusion based on the work performed. We conducted our engagement in accordance with the Sri Lanka Standard on Assurance Engagements 3000: Assurance Engagements Other Than Audits or Reviews of Historical Financial Information, issued by The Institute of Chartered Accountants of Sri Lanka.

This Standard requires amongst others that we comply with applicable ethical requirements, including independence requirements, and plan and perform the engagement to obtain reasonable and limited assurance about whether the Report is free of material misstatement.

Summary of Work Performed

Data on financial performance

A reasonable assurance engagement on financial performance reported under Financial Review of this Report involves verification that they were properly derived from the Audited Financial Statements of the Bank for the year ended December 31, 2013.

Key Sustainability Reporting Indicators

A limited assurance engagement on Key Sustainability Reporting Indicators in this Report consists of making inquiries, primarily of persons responsible for the preparation of information presented in this Report, and applying analytical and other evidence gathering procedures, as appropriate. These procedures included:

• Inquiries of management to gain an understanding of the Bank’s processes for determining the material issues for the Bank’s key stakeholder groups.
• Interviews with senior management and relevant staff at group level and selected business unit level concerning sustainability strategy and policies for material issues, and the implementation of these across the business.
• Interviews with relevant staff at corporate and business unit level responsible for providing the information in this Report.
• Inquiries about the design and implementation of the systems and methods used to collect and process the information reported, including the aggregation of data into information as presented in this Report.
• Comparing the information presented in this Report to corresponding information in the relevant underlying sources to determine whether all the relevant information contained in such underlying sources has been included in this Report.
• Reading the information presented in this Report to determine whether it is in line with our overall knowledge of, and experience with, the sustainability performance of the Bank.
• Visits to selected project sites and branches to review systems and data.

Our Conclusion

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

• The data on financial performance, as reported under Financial Review of this Report 2013 are properly derived from the Financial Statements of the Bank for the year ended December 31, 2013 for which the Independent Auditors have issued an unqualified audit opinion dated February 24, 2014.
• Nothing has come to our attention that causes us to believe that the Key Sustainability Reporting Indicators presented in this Report are not fairly presented, in all material respects, in accordance with the GRI Sustainability Reporting Guidelines as described in Reporting Parameters.

Our assurance report is made solely to Commercial Bank of Ceylon PLC in accordance with the terms of our engagement. Our work has been undertaken so that we might state to Bank those matters we have been engaged to state in this assurance report and for no other purpose. We do not accept or assume responsibility to anyone other than Commercial Bank of Ceylon PLC for our work, for this assurance report, or for the conclusions we have reached.

Chartered Accountants

Colombo
February 24, 2014