Former minister Rohitha Bogollagama has been arrested by the Commission to Investigate Allegations of Bribery or Corruption (CIABOC), the Daily Mirror and Hiru News reported on Wednesday.
Both accounts describe the same sequence. Bogollagama went to the commission’s offices on Wednesday (7) to give a statement in connection with a corruption allegation, was questioned by investigators, and was taken into custody afterwards. He is to be produced before the Colombo Chief Magistrate’s Court.
Hiru attributes its account to an official of the commission. The Daily Mirror attributes the detail that he was taken into custody after questioning to reports rather than to a named source.
What neither filing says
Neither report identifies the allegation, the ministry or period it relates to, or the sum involved. Neither names the offence CIABOC says it is investigating, states whether anyone else has been arrested in the same matter, or gives the time of the arrest. No lawyer for Bogollagama is quoted, and no statement from him or from his party appears in either filing. Neither says when he is to be produced in court.
This is the limit of what has been reported so far, and readers should treat the scope of the case as unestablished until the commission sets out its allegation in open court.
The third CIABOC arrest in two days
The arrest lands in the middle of a run of detentions by the same commission.
On Wednesday morning CIABOC arrested former First Lady Shiranthi Rajapaksa at her home over a Rs. 10 million payment from a state bank under the Public Property Act. Later the same day it arrested Pradeep Kariyawasam, the former chairman of the National Savings Bank — the state bank at the centre of that same inquiry.
The commission is separately pursuing the Rs. 70 million Krrish bribery case, in which MP Namal Rajapaksa and former Krrish director Janaki Siriwardena are in remand custody until 16 October.
Whether the Bogollagama matter is connected to any of these is not reported. On the available filings it should be read as a separate case until the commission says otherwise.
Sources: Daily Mirror, Hiru News.
