Sri Lanka’s former president Ranil Wickremesinghe has been arrested over alleged misuse of state funds for private journey, police mentioned.
Wickremesinghe, 76, who served as president from 2022 to 2024 and had six prior phrases as prime minister, has denied the allegations.
Authorities are looking for to query Mr Wickremesinghe over allegations that he used state funds for a private stopover within the UK whereas coming back from an official journey in 2023.
This marks the primary arrest of a former Sri Lankan president.
In 2023, Mr Wickremesinghe made a stopover in London on his return from Cuba, the place he had attended a G77 summit. In the course of the go to, he and his spouse, Maithree, participated in a ceremony on the College of Wolverhampton, in keeping with AFP.
Mr Wickremesinghe has insisted that his spouse coated her personal bills and that no public funds had been used.
However Sri Lanka’s Prison Investigation Division (CID) mentioned state cash financed the non-public go to, together with the prices of his bodyguards.
Earlier this month, authorities additionally questioned Mr Wickremesinghe’s former presidential secretary, Saman Ekanayake, and his former non-public secretary, Sandra Perera, concerning their involvement in organising the go to.
On Friday afternoon, native TV captured Mr Wickremesinghe arriving on the Fort Justice of the Peace’s Court docket in Colombo.
Mr Wickremesinghe has been a distinguished political determine since 1977 and was credited with serving to Sri Lanka recuperate from its worst financial disaster. He performed a key function in securing an Worldwide Financial Fund (IMF) bailout in 2023.
Mr Wickremesinghe is a lawyer by career and comes from a politically influential household. He was first elected to parliament in 1977 on the age of simply 28.
As chief of the United Nationwide Get together (UNP), he held a number of phrases as prime minister between 1993 and 2019. Amid the 2022 protests that compelled Gotabaya Rajapaksa to resign, Mr Wickremesinghe was appointed prime minister after which grew to become president, regardless of having no parliamentary seat.
Mr Wickremesinghe has confronted criticism from human rights teams for selling repressive legal guidelines, cracking down on protests, and suppressing memorial occasions, in keeping with Sri Lankan outlet the Tamil Guardian.
Mr Wickremesinghe misplaced final 12 months’s election to populist challenger Anura Kumara Dissanayake, who ran on an anti-corruption platform.
