Sri Lankan investigators have reached out to the United States’ Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) and a US-based cybersecurity firm specialising in email-fraud detection as the probe into the Treasury’s USD 2.5 million loss goes international, a senior CID official told the Sunday Times.
“We have yet to learn where the fraudulent emails originated from, where the funds that were fraudulently diverted from the Treasury are and who was behind the scam. The Financial Intelligence Unit of the Central Bank is also unaware as yet of these details,” the official said on condition of anonymity. Australian authorities are also assisting the probe, which the CID earlier said had drawn in INTERPOL and the Australian Federal Police.
Although the Finance Ministry has acknowledged it was aware of the hacking in January, the first complaint to the Criminal Investigation Department was lodged only on March 28 by a director general of the ministry. A senior Treasury official told the paper there is “strong suspicion” that documents relating to repayments of loans to other countries were also hacked or copied. The CID has seized data of transactions over the past few months.
The Computer Crime Investigation Division this week reported the case to the Colombo Fort Magistrate’s Court for the first time. Magistrate Isuru Neththikumara approved the appointment of an expert committee from SLCERT, the Government Analyst’s Department and the Dean of Colombo University’s School of Computing, and ordered banks to share account details of the five interdicted Treasury officials. The next progress report is due on June 3.
Investigators told court the emails impersonated Australia’s Export Finance Agency under the country’s debt-restructuring repayments, with the legitimate exportfinance.gov.au domain altered to a fraudulent address — a switch flagged by a private firm on October 28 last year but disregarded. Some External Resources Department records have been deleted, the CID said, with no suspects yet identified.
The Finance Ministry separately rejected last week’s Sunday Times report that French loan repayment documents had gone missing, calling it “factually incorrect and misleading” and stating that repayments to all lenders are continuing as scheduled.
Health Minister Dr. Nalinda Jayatissa, speaking at an event at the Kalutara District Secretariat on Sunday, confirmed that an internal inquiry by the Ministry of Finance is now running in parallel with the CID and CIABOC investigations. Investigators are focused on whether any public officials were directly involved in the scam, he said, and if no intentional wrongdoing is found steps will be taken to establish a stronger institutional mechanism to prevent recurrence.
