The Director General of the Commission to Investigate Allegations of Bribery or Corruption (CIABOC), Ranga Dissanayake, has told an International Monetary Fund forum that Sri Lanka’s 2022 economic collapse cannot be explained by debt and mismanagement alone.
“Not only the debts, not only the mismanagement, not only the economic reasons, but also lack of integrity and corruption.”
He was speaking on Monday (21) at the IMF Legal Department’s 80th anniversary in Washington, D.C., on a panel with Krishna Srinivasan, Director of the IMF’s Asia and Pacific Department, NewsFirst reported.
”A classic example”
Dissanayake described Sri Lanka as a classic case of governance failure feeding economic collapse — a country once compared to Singapore in the 1960s that by 2022 was bankrupt and seeking IMF assistance.
He noted that Sri Lanka’s Supreme Court has itself identified corruption as one of the causes of the crisis, and said this was why the country became the first in Asia to request an IMF Governance Diagnostic Assessment, carried out in 2023.
Twenty years between ratification and law
Dissanayake pointed to the Anti-Corruption Act No. 9 of 2023 as a modern statute aligned with international standards, designed to create a commission independent of government, with its own financing and dedicated staff.
But he acknowledged a long gap: Sri Lanka ratified the UN Convention Against Corruption in 2004, and it took nearly two decades to produce comprehensive legislation meeting international expectations.
Dissanayake was appointed Director General in January 2025, after two decades as a lawyer, magistrate and High Court judge.
Context
The remarks land on a day when CIABOC made two arrests at home — a former Western Province health minister and a former ministerial secretary over a Rs. 8.1 million phosphate export bribe.
Not reported
NewsFirst does not report whether Dissanayake addressed CIABOC’s own capacity — the 2023 diagnostic’s central finding concerned the weakness of Sri Lanka’s accountability institutions — nor whether he gave conviction figures, named the Supreme Court ruling he cited, or discussed the commission’s funding in practice.
