COLOMBO: Sri Lanka’s new government on Saturday announced a criminal investigation into the $2.3 billion purchase of 10 Airbus aircraft for the island’s loss-making national carrier under the former government.
Prime Minister Ranil Wickremesinghe’s office said an independent board of inquiry found gross violations of financial regulations and procurement procedures in state-owned Sri Lankan Airlines’s deal, and said they warranted criminal prosecutions against former executives.
The panel carrying out the probe handed a dossier to Wickremesinghe on Thursday and officials, speaking on condition of anonymity, said the government had accepted its recommendations.
“The Board of Inquiry has found shocking details of corruption running into billions of dollars, manipulations of service contracting, recruitment of unqualified staff and major security breaches at Sri Lankan Airlines under the former government,” the premier’s office said in a statement.
It said the investigating panel, headed by a former chairman of anti-graft watchdog Transparency International’s Sri Lanka office, found a “culture of corruption” in the airline, which had accumulated losses of over $650 million.
The board of inquiry recommended “criminal investigations into the entire re-fleeting process”.
In particular, it said there was sufficient evidence to prosecute the airline’s former chairman Nishantha Wickramasinghe — the brother-in-law of ex-president Mahinda Rajapakse as well as former chief executive Kapila Chandrasena, who resigned last month when the panel called for action against him in an interim report.
