Samagi Jana Balawegaya MP Chaminda Wijesiri told Parliament on Friday that bribery investigations are being conducted asymmetrically: people alleged to have accepted bribes are arrested, remanded and produced before courts, while people alleged to have paid them are interviewed overseas by travelling investigators and left where they are.
“Offering a bribe is also an offence. If a person admits to having paid a bribe, why isn’t that individual also brought back to Sri Lanka?” Wijesiri asked, the Daily Mirror reported in a filing stamped 6.48 p.m. Colombo time.
The asymmetry he describes
Wijesiri’s argument rests on a structural observation rather than on a single case.
He acknowledged the authorities’ efforts to apprehend underworld figures operating overseas, then asked whether the same determination was being applied to alleged large-scale corruption. In the corruption cases, he said, the pattern runs the other way: investigators travel abroad to obtain statements and sworn affidavits from alleged payers, while alleged recipients remain in custody at home.
He argued that an investigation should establish the full circumstances of an alleged transaction — who offered the money, who accepted it, and where it changed hands — and that taking a statement abroad from one party while the other is held in Sri Lanka does not deliver that.
Wijesiri put it to the minister that the approach risked creating “the impression of a political performance” rather than a comprehensive investigation, and asked directly whether the Government had approved the procedure or whether it was being pursued for political reasons. He called on the minister to clarify whether the practice was deliberate policy, and whether the same legal standards were being applied to everyone implicated.
What the filing leaves open
Three gaps are worth naming.
The report does not name the minister to whom the questions were addressed, and does not record a reply. It does not identify the case or cases Wijesiri was describing — no investigation, agency, country or individual is named, so it is not possible to say from this filing which overseas interviews he meant. And it does not say whether the practice he describes reflects the limits of Sri Lanka’s extradition and mutual legal assistance arrangements, which would be the obvious alternative explanation to the political one he proposes.
That last point matters. Compelling a witness or suspect who is abroad to return is a function of extradition treaties and mutual assistance channels, not of investigative willingness alone. The filing records Wijesiri’s question but not the answer, so readers have his framing without the procedural account that would test it.
Context
The question lands in an unusually active month for Sri Lankan corruption enforcement. Parliament enacted an amendment to the Anti-Corruption Act on 19 October and named a 13-member anti-corruption committee the following day. The Commission to Investigate Allegations of Bribery or Corruption has meanwhile raided and arrested a secretary to MP Namal Rajapaksa, summoned former foreign minister G.L. Peiris, and pursued bribery cases against former ministers that were postponed on 20 October.
Wijesiri’s intervention is a test of that activity’s evenness rather than of its volume — and, on the filing available, an unanswered one.
Sourcing note
This report rests on a single source. The Daily Mirror is a verified newsroom and its filing was date-checked against the publication’s own datePublished stamp. No other verified newsroom had carried the exchange at the time of writing — Hiru News and NewsFirst had filed nothing on it, and Ada Derana has been unreachable from this desk for 36 consecutive days. A domain-restricted search across the verified Sri Lankan outlets returned no filing on this event.