Sri Lanka’s former president Ranil Wickremesinghe has been arrested in connection with the alleged misuse of public funds, police confirmed on Friday.
The 76-year-old faces three charges relating to foreign trips he undertook during his tenure as president between 2022 and 2024. He appeared before magistrates in Colombo after providing a statement to the Criminal Investigations Department (CID) earlier in the day.
According to investigators, Wickremesinghe made 23 foreign trips while in office at a cost exceeding 600 million rupees (£1.4m). Friday’s arrest is linked to a stopover in the United Kingdom in 2023, following his attendance at a G77 summit in Cuba. On that occasion, he and his wife participated in a ceremony at the University of Wolverhampton. The CID alleges the visit was private and financed using state funds, a claim Wickremesinghe has rejected.
The case was first referred to court in June. Wickremesinghe is the first former president to be arrested in the island nation’s history.
A seasoned political figure, he has held office as prime minister six times since the 1990s and became president in 2022 after Gotabaya Rajapaksa fled the country during a mass uprising sparked by the worst economic crisis in Sri Lanka’s history. He was widely credited with steering the nation towards recovery but was defeated in the 2024 election by left-leaning candidate Anura Kumara Dissanayake.
Wickremesinghe, a lawyer by profession from a prominent family of politicians and businessmen, has been a fixture of Sri Lankan politics since first entering parliament in 1977. As leader of the United National Party (UNP) from 1994, he introduced a disciplinary commission aimed at removing corrupt figures and was often praised for attempting to restore the party’s credibility.
Despite repeated bids for the presidency, Wickremesinghe only secured the role after Rajapaksa’s dramatic departure. His party, having been nearly wiped out in the 2020 elections, was left with him as its sole parliamentary representative before his sudden elevation to the presidency
