Sri Lanka’s former president Ranil Wickremesinghe has been arrested in connection with the alleged misuse of funds, police have said.<\/p>\n
The charge relates to trips he took abroad while serving as president.<\/p>\n
He arrived at magistrates court in the capital Colombo on Friday, having already given a statement to the Criminal Investigations Department (CID) earlier in the day.<\/p>\n
Wickremesinghe served as president from 2022 to 2024, stepping into the role after the country’s worst ever economic crisis triggered a popular uprising caused his predecessor Gotabaya Rajapaksa to flee. <\/p>\n
He was widely credited with helping put the island nation back on the road to economic recovery. <\/p>\n
Wickremesinghe also served six separate terms as prime minister from the 1990s onwards.<\/p>\n
According to BBC Sinhala, the 76-year-old made 23 foreign trips during his time as president, at a cost of more than Rs 600 million ($2m; \u00a31.4m).<\/p>\n
Friday’s arrest relates to a stop over made in the UK in 2023, on Wickremesinghe’s way back from a G77 summit in Cuba, news agency AFP reports.<\/p>\n
On that occasion, he and his wife had attended a University of Wolverhampton ceremony.<\/p>\n
Sri Lanka’s CID allege this was a private visit for which state funds were used – something Wickremesinghe has denied.<\/p>\n
Their investigation was initially referred to a court in June.<\/p>\n
Wickremesinghe, who is the first former president to be arrested in Sri Lanka, has been a feature of the island nation’s politics since he was first elected as MP in 1977.<\/p>\n
A lawyer by profession, he comes from an affluent family of politicians and businessmen.<\/p>\n
He was credited with cleaning up the image of the United National Party (UNP) after taking over its leadership in 1994 by bringing in a disciplinary commission to get rid of corrupt party members.<\/p>\n
Over the years, he went on to make several bids to become president – only getting the role he had long-wanted in 2022 after Rajapaksa fled. <\/p>\n
At the time his party was almost wiped out in the 2020 elections, and he was left as its sole representative in parliament.<\/p>\n
He lost the 2024 election to the left-leaning Anura Kumara Dissanayake.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Sri Lanka’s former president Ranil Wickremesinghe has been arrested in connection with the alleged misuse of funds, police…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":87321,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[43,44,41,39,42,40],"class_list":["post-87320","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-headlines","tag-headlines","tag-news","tag-top-news","tag-top-stories","tag-topnews","tag-topstories"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/87320","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=87320"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/87320\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/87321"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=87320"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=87320"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=87320"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}