A timekeeper at the Raddolugama Bus Stand has been arrested by the Commission to Investigate Allegations of Bribery or Corruption over a bribe of one hundred rupees.
The suspect, named as Deepal Perera, is attached to the Gampaha Regional Office of the Road Passenger Transport Authority. He was arrested inside the timekeeper’s booth at the bus stand on Tuesday, the Daily Mirror reported at 9.08 p.m. under a Colombo dateline.
What he is alleged to have done
CIABOC officials say the money was demanded from the operator of a bus running on Route No. 188, between Raddolugama and Colombo.
The bribe was allegedly sought in exchange for two things: allowing the bus to depart after the scheduled departure time recorded in the official logbook, and permitting it to operate under favourable conditions.
Why a hundred-rupee case is worth reporting
The sum is small enough to look trivial. The mechanism is not.
A timekeeper controls the logbook — the record of when each bus on a route actually left the stand. Departure slots are the scarce commodity on a shared route: a bus that leaves late, after a competitor has already pulled out, travels behind it and picks up the passengers who have accumulated at each halt since. Control of the written record of departure times is therefore control over which operator earns more on any given run.
That is what distinguishes this from a one-off demand for cash. On the allegation as reported, the payment did not buy an exemption from a rule; it bought a favourable entry in the official record, and the discretion being sold is exercised many times a day on every route the office oversees. Rs 100 is the unit price, not the scale.
The enforcement context
CIABOC has been visible at the larger end of transport-sector corruption this year. This archive has previously covered the commission’s case over the issuance of bus route permits, in which a former official was granted bail in September. Tuesday’s arrest sits at the opposite end of the same sector — a booth at a suburban bus stand rather than a permit office.
A name collision worth recording. A former chairman of the National Transport Commission named Renuka Perera was arrested by CIABOC in September in a separate bus-permit case. The man arrested on Tuesday is Deepal Perera, a timekeeper in the Gampaha regional office of a different authority. The two share a common Sri Lankan surname and nothing else, and no filing connects them. This is noted because a bare search of this archive for “Perera” and “CIABOC” now returns both.
Not reported
No filing states the suspect’s age, how long he has held the post, whether the arrest followed a complaint from the bus operator or a surveillance operation, or whether the money was recovered. Nothing has been published about a court appearance, bail, or the charges contemplated. The bus operator is not named, and no filing says whether the operator is a complainant or a witness.
Nor has the Road Passenger Transport Authority commented, or said whether the timekeeper has been suspended.
On sourcing. This is a single-source report. This desk searched for the same arrest across the other verified newsrooms and found no independent filing — a routine outcome for a petty-corruption brief filed late in the Colombo evening. CIABOC’s own “Detection & Raids” page, which would be the primary record, returned an error to this host.
A date trap sits directly on this story. NewsFirst carries an article headlined “Time Keeper arrested for soliciting Rs. 100/- as a bribe” — the same offence, the same authority and the identical sum — published on 24 September 2020, six years ago. Its URL carries the year (/2020/09/24/). It is a different arrest and has not been used here. Anyone searching this story should date every result before treating it as corroboration.
Sources: Daily Mirror — Transport Authority timekeeper arrested over Rs. 100 bribe.
