Sugeeshwara Bandara, former private secretary to ex-President Gotabaya Rajapaksa, has been further remanded until 28 October after being produced before the Fort Magistrate’s Court on Wednesday.
The magistrate made the order after the Central Crimes Investigation Bureau presented its submissions, Hiru News reported at 10.26 a.m.
Bandara, who leads the Nava Janatha Peramuna, was arrested over the alleged drawing of salary payments for two posts under the President’s expenditure head.
Four months and eleven days
Wednesday’s order extends a detention that began with his arrest by the CCIB on 18 June. He has now been in remand custody for 125 days. The new date takes it to 132.
The remand has been renewed at roughly fortnightly intervals throughout — to 30 July, to 25 August, to 23 September, and to 7 October, when investigators told the court that statements were still to be recorded from a further fifty people.
That figure is the one to watch against Wednesday’s order. It was given on 23 September, more than three months after the arrest, and nothing published since has said how many of those statements have been taken. Hiru’s filing reports only that the CCIB made submissions; it does not summarise them.
The allegation
Investigators have previously told the court the case concerns approximately Rs. 6.19 million drawn as salaries for two positions under the President’s expenditure head — Bandara serving as a secretary to Gotabaya Rajapaksa in 2022 while also holding a project director post at the Presidential Secretariat during Ranil Wickremesinghe’s tenure.
He has made repeated unsuccessful applications for bail. A fourth was refused in August, when counsel told the court he was a heart patient with damaged arteries who was also suffering from blood poisoning; he was admitted to the prison hospital on 21 August after a blood vessel in his leg burst. In September the court found no exceptional circumstances justifying release.
Not reported
Hiru’s filing does not name the magistrate, say whether a fresh bail application was made or refused on Wednesday, or report anything about Bandara’s medical condition. It gives no account of what the CCIB told the court, no indication of when the investigation is expected to conclude, and no date for the filing of charges.
A gap in this archive. The hearing of 7 October, at which the remand was extended to Wednesday’s date, was not covered here; NewsFirst filed on it at the time. This report therefore picks the sequence up one hearing later than it should.
On sourcing. This is a single-source report. Ada Derana carried Wednesday’s hearing, but the site has returned a CloudFront block to this desk for more than a month and the filing could not be retrieved or dated, so it is not cited. Neither the Daily Mirror’s breaking-news listing nor NewsFirst carried the item at the time of writing.