Former First Lady Shiranthi Rajapaksa, the wife of former President Mahinda Rajapaksa, left Sri Lanka for Singapore in the early hours of Wednesday morning — eight days before she is due to appear before the Financial Crimes Investigation Division (FCID).
She departed Bandaranaike International Airport at around 1.10 a.m. aboard Singapore Airlines flight SQ-469, airport sources told the Daily Mirror. Mrs. Anne de Livera, the mother-in-law of her youngest son Rohitha Rajapaksa, travelled with her.
Both the Daily Mirror and NewsFirst report that she has been summoned to appear before the FCID on September 24. NewsFirst says the summons concerns an investigation into the “Siriliya” account.
What the Siriliya file already contains
The name has surfaced twice before in the past five months, each time before a different investigating body.
In April, the Commission to Investigate Allegations of Bribery or Corruption demanded an explanation from Shiranthi Rajapaksa over how a house on Torrington Avenue, Colombo, had been acquired. CIABOC tied that request to an investigation it described as involving the “Siriliya account”, said it suspected the property may have been acquired unlawfully, and suspended the transfer of its ownership pending a satisfactory explanation.
On September 10, CIABOC summoned astrologer Sumanadasa Abeygunawardena — a former National Savings Bank director — to record a statement over Siriliya Saviya.
Wednesday’s summons is from a different agency. The FCID is a police division; CIABOC is an independent commission. Neither outlet says whether the FCID inquiry is the same matter CIABOC has been pursuing, a parallel investigation, or a separate file that happens to share a name.
Context
The departure comes during an intensive week for investigations touching the family. Her eldest son, MP Namal Rajapaksa, is in remand custody until 18 September and was due before the Fort Magistrate’s Court on Wednesday in the CID’s SriLankan Airlines money laundering case.
Not reported
Neither outlet states that Shiranthi Rajapaksa is subject to any travel restriction, nor that her departure breaches any order — no court has been reported as imposing one. Neither says whether she intends to return before 24 September, whether the FCID was notified of the trip, the purpose of the journey, or how long she plans to stay.
Neither explains what the “Siriliya” account is, what sums or transactions the FCID is examining, or whether anyone else has been summoned in the same inquiry. Neither carries a comment from her, from a family representative, or from the FCID. Ada Derana was unreachable behind a CloudFront block at the time of writing, and Hiru News had not filed on the departure.
Update (16 September): the family says there was no earlier summons
A member of the Rajapaksa family has rejected the account above, and the disagreement goes to the central fact of the story — whether Shiranthi Rajapaksa left the country knowing the FCID had called her.
The family member told Hiru News that reports saying she left despite a summons are false. On that account:
- No previous summons had been issued requiring her to appear before the FCID to give a statement, and the FCID had made no prior call to her.
- She travelled directly from a private hospital to the airport.
- An airport official handed her the FCID letter near the departure gate, shortly before her flight was due to leave at 12.50 a.m. — so the notification was served at the moment of departure, not days before it.
The Daily Mirror carried the same denial at 11.26 a.m. on Wednesday, about three hours after its own earlier report, in the same terms.
The two accounts cannot both be right. The original reporting, from the Daily Mirror and NewsFirst, is that she had been summoned to appear on 24 September and left eight days ahead of that date. The family’s account is that no summons existed until a letter was put into her hands at the gate.
Neither the Daily Mirror nor Hiru resolves the conflict, and neither withdraws the earlier framing — the Daily Mirror’s follow-up opens by restating that she left “despite being summoned” and then reports the denial of exactly that. The 24 September date, which appeared in both original reports, is not mentioned in either follow-up, and neither says what the letter served at the airport actually required of her or for what date.
The FCID has not commented. Both accounts are attributed here as reported; nothing available establishes which is correct.
One further detail is left unexplained on either version: the departure time. The Daily Mirror originally reported that she flew at around 1.10 a.m. aboard Singapore Airlines flight SQ-469; the family’s account gives a scheduled departure of 12.50 a.m. That is consistent with a short delay rather than a contradiction, but no outlet reconciles the two figures.
Update (16 September): what the revived Siriliya file actually contains
NewsFirst published a fuller account on Wednesday evening that answers most of the questions left open above — what the inquiry is about, and why it is happening now.
The FCID has reopened an investigation into alleged irregular transactions at the Siriliya Saviya Foundation, of which Shiranthi Rajapaksa was Chairperson. Investigations into the matter date back to 2015, NewsFirst reports, but the files stalled at various stages over the years and have only recently been reactivated. That is the key fact: this is an eleven-year-old file being restarted, not a new allegation.
Six strands are now under scrutiny, according to NewsFirst:
- Funds transferred to the foundation by state institutions.
- Vehicles imported for the organisation under tax concessions.
- Use of foundation vehicles by the CSN network — the television channel previously at the centre of separate proceedings against the family.
- Fundraising campaigns to buy a CT scanner for the Lady Ridgeway Hospital for Children, and how those funds were spent. NewsFirst reports that earlier investigations had found the scanner in question was in fact received as a donation from a foreign country — which, if established, would leave the money raised for it unaccounted for.
- Funds collected and spent on HIV/AIDS prevention programmes.
- A Colombo residence allegedly owned by Shiranthi Rajapaksa that was listed as the address of the foundation’s treasurer.
Investigators have also returned to a bank account reportedly opened using the National Identity Card number “222222222V” as her identification number — a sequence of nine identical digits, which is not a valid NIC format.
NewsFirst carries both accounts of the departure in the same report, without adjudicating between them: that she was notified to appear on 24 September and left at around 1.10 a.m. accompanied by a female relative, and the family’s statement that no prior summons existed, that she came to the airport from a private hospital, and that the letter was handed to her near the departure gate. It describes her travelling companion only as “a female relative,” where the Daily Mirror named Mrs. Anne de Livera.
One name to note. NewsFirst spells the foundation “Siriliya Saviya” in this report, matching CIABOC’s September summons to Sumanadasa Abeygunawardena; its own earlier report on Wednesday used “Siriliya” alone, and the headline uses “Sriliya.” All three refer to the same foundation.
Still unreported: what sums are involved in any of the six strands, whether anyone besides Shiranthi Rajapaksa has been summoned in the FCID inquiry, why the file stalled between 2015 and now, whether the FCID and CIABOC investigations are the same matter, and when she is expected to return.
