State-owned SriLankan Airlines has been hit by two separate financial frauds — one involving a hacked agent email in Dubai and another involving forged documents in Chennai — Deputy Finance Minister Anil Jayantha confirmed on Saturday.
In the Dubai case, the carrier remitted US$265,000 (about 954,000 UAE dirhams, or roughly Rs. 80 million) to a wrong bank account after receiving payment instructions through the official email of a Dubai-based agent. EconomyNext, citing two sources familiar with the inquiry, reported the agent’s email had been hacked and the attacker used it to redirect the funds. “The agent’s email was hacked and the hacker has used the agent’s email to ask SriLankan to deposit the money into a different account,” a source said.
The second fraud was detected at SriLankan’s Chennai office, where three Indian nationals employed at the South India station allegedly swindled around Rs. 80 million using forged documents. Indian police are now probing the case.
“If there is any leakage or any issue under our government everything will be investigated, the information will be provided and we will address this quickly,” Jayantha told reporters. He said the Dubai agent had informed the airline that the problem lay with SriLankan’s own system but added that the carrier “paid that much money not to the agent, but to someone else.” The Chennai loss, he said, was “clearly” the work of employees who “forged some documents and taken some money out.”
The disclosures confirm the alleged transaction error first raised by opposition MP Dayasiri Jayasekara through Newswire on Friday, when he urged a probe into payments tied to the airline’s Chennai branch and Dubai operations that were said to have been deposited into an account at Abu Dhabi Islamic Bank.
In its own statements, the airline put the Dubai sum at AED 974,000 and said a third party had altered the service provider’s bank account details and supporting documents through official communication channels to mislead the carrier. SriLankan also disclaimed any liability to the UAE service provider for non-receipt of funds, saying the loss arose from “compromise of their email system which was entirely outside control of SriLankan Airlines.” Complaints have been lodged with authorities in the UAE and with Sri Lanka’s CID; “investigations are underway in multiple jurisdictions.”
On Chennai, the carrier confirmed that “a few Indian nationals” who worked at the finance department of its Chennai office misappropriated INR 22 million by “fraudulently altering invoices, payment details and signatures” over a period of time. The airline’s Colombo head office detected unusual payments, triggered an internal investigation, and the implicated staff “ceased reporting to work.” The matter has been referred to Indian law enforcement and recovery efforts are underway.
EconomyNext noted the airline incidents add to a recent pattern of financial frauds against state institutions, including the US$2.5 million Treasury cyber theft and a US$625,000 missing payment from the Postal Department. The carrier remains under sustained scrutiny following its Rs. 91 billion dollar bond restructuring and the parallel CIABOC inquiry into the Airbus bribery case involving former chief executive Kapila Chandrasena.
