Shiranthi Rajapaksa was released on bail by the Colombo Chief Magistrate’s Court on Friday evening, hours after a medical board at the Colombo National Hospital told the same court that she requires bypass surgery.

Chief Magistrate Asanga S. Bodaragama ordered her release on cash bail of Rs. 100,000 and two personal sureties of Rs. 10 million each, and imposed an order prohibiting her from travelling overseas, NewsFirst reported. The wife of former President Mahinda Rajapaksa had been in remand custody until Friday following her arrest by the Commission to Investigate Allegations of Bribery or Corruption.

The medical report came first. At the morning sitting, the Chief Magistrate disclosed the contents of a report he had ordered produced that day, prepared by a board of doctors at the Colombo National Hospital, which stated that Rajapaksa requires a bypass operation. The Daily Mirror carried the same disclosure and, in its report on the bail order, named the bank at the centre of the case: the Rs. 10 million she is accused of misappropriating was transferred from the National Savings Bank to the Siriliya Saviya account.

What the archive adds, and one gap it exposes

Rajapaksa was arrested by CIABOC on the morning of 7 October over the alleged misappropriation of Rs. 10 million obtained from a state bank, under the Bribery Act and the Public Property Act. At that hearing she was remanded by Colombo Additional Magistrate Darshima Premaratne — and remanded until 13 October.

NewsFirst says she had been remanded “until today,” meaning 16 October. Those two dates cannot both describe the same order, so the remand was extended at a sitting between the 13th and the 16th that this desk did not cover and that no filing on Friday mentions. The extension is recorded here as a gap rather than reconciled.

Her release also closes a nine-day spell in custody that followed a longer sequence: a missed FCID appearance in September attributed to eye surgery, an anticipatory bail application at the Maligakanda Magistrate’s Court on 5 October seeking to bar her arrest on return from treatment abroad, and a transfer to the general ward of the National Eye Hospital on 9 October. Friday’s report moves the medical question from ophthalmic to cardiac.

A figure to watch, not to settle

The Rs. 10 million surety figure is worth flagging for a specific reason. At the 7 October hearing, Pradeep Kariyawasam — the former National Savings Bank chairman arrested in the same investigation, and husband of former Chief Justice Shirani Bandaranayake — was granted bail, and the Daily Mirror reported his sureties twice with a tenfold difference: two of Rs. 1 million each in one filing, two of Rs. 10 million each in another. This desk left that unresolved.

Friday’s order shows Rs. 10 million sureties being set in this case by this court. That makes the higher figure plausible for Kariyawasam, but it does not establish it: a different defendant at a different hearing before a different magistrate can be given different terms. The discrepancy stands unresolved.

Chief Magistrate Bodaragama is the judge before whom Colombo’s major financial-crime matters are routinely called, among them the National Development Bank fraud investigation and a series of FCID illegal-transfer cases.

Separately on Friday, former President Gotabaya Rajapaksa asked the Colombo Fort Magistrate’s Court to lift his own overseas travel ban for cardiac follow-up treatment in Singapore. Shiranthi Rajapaksa’s bail was granted with a fresh travel ban attached the same day.

Not reported

No filing gives the next date in the case, the charges as formally framed, or whether CIABOC objected to bail. None says whether the bypass surgery is to be performed in Sri Lanka or abroad, when it is scheduled, or whether the travel ban attached to her bail would be relaxed if treatment overseas were sought — the question her 5 October anticipatory bail application was originally about. None reports who stood as her sureties.

Sources: NewsFirst — bail, NewsFirst — medical report, Daily Mirror — bail, Daily Mirror — medical report.