A 25-year-old man has been arrested in Wellampitiya over the alleged illegal transfer of US$25 million out of Sri Lanka, NewsFirst reported on Thursday.
The arrest was made in an operation by the Financial Crimes Investigation Division. The suspect is a resident of Colombo 12.
Investigators allege he ran the operation through six fictitious companies, moving the money out under the guise of importing goods, between January 2024 and July 2025. He is to be produced before the Colombo Chief Magistrate’s Court.
The mechanism is now a familiar one
Nothing in the method described is new. The pattern — companies that exist on paper, outbound bank payments documented as settlement for imports, and goods that never arrive — is the same one Sri Lankan investigators have been working through all year, and this is at least the third arrest on it since June.
In September the FCID arrested a 35-year-old over roughly Rs. 24.85 billion in foreign currency sent abroad against imports that never arrived, through five of 89 companies then under investigation. In June the same division arrested a man at Periyamulla, Negombo in the same 89-company inquiry. Separately, a businessman accused of moving US$80 million was remanded in September as part of a wider case in which more than US$1 billion is alleged to have left the country through 36 front companies and 199 telegraphic transfers, and in which officials of four private banks have been remanded.
The scale was set out in Parliament in June, when Public Security Minister Ananda Wijepala disclosed that multi-agency probes had traced about US$85 million in foreign exchange fraud to bogus imports. The government responded on 19 June with a gazette requiring banks to attach a unique reference number to every import-related telegraphic transfer and to share importer data with Customs.
How close is this to the September arrest?
Close enough to be worth separating deliberately, because the two filings share four details.
Both describe an arrest at Wellampitiya; both describe a suspect resident in Colombo 12; both involve six companies on at least one outlet’s account of the September case; and both end at the Colombo Chief Magistrate’s Court.
They differ on the facts that matter. The suspect arrested in September was 35; this one is 25. September’s transfers were put at Rs. 24.85 billion — roughly US$83 million at the rates prevailing over the period — against US$25 million, or about Rs. 7.5 billion, here. September’s window was 11 months from December 2024; this one runs 19 months from January 2024.
On the published record these are two different arrests of two different people. No filing links them, and this article does not assert a connection beyond the obvious one: the same investigating division is working the same category of offence in the same part of Colombo.
Not reported
NewsFirst does not name the suspect, say when the arrest was made, identify the six companies or the banks whose channels were used, or name the destination jurisdictions. It does not say whether this arrest falls within the 89-company investigation already under way, nor whether the suspect has yet appeared in court. No rupee equivalent is given for the US$25 million, and no charge is specified.
This article is single-sourced. Ada Derana has also carried the arrest, but that domain has been unreachable to this desk for several weeks and the filing could not be fetched or dated; no other verified newsroom this desk could reach had filed on it at the time of writing.
