NDF MP Ravi Karunanayake has called on the government to appoint an independent forensic auditor under the President’s authority as Minister of Finance to investigate the Rs. 13.2 billion fraud at NDB Bank, warning of a “potential conflict of interest” in the Central Bank’s appointment of Deloitte TTI for the same task.

Raising the issue in Parliament on Tuesday under Standing Order 27(2) as a matter of “grave national importance,” Karunanayake said the alleged fraud spanned the financial years 2024, 2025 and the first quarter of 2026, and that statutory accountability under the Central Bank of Sri Lanka Act No. 16 of 2023 was now in question.

The former finance minister pressed the government on how CBSL had failed to detect or act on a large-scale fraud over more than three years despite its supervisory mandate. He told the chamber that at least two banks had reported suspicious transactions to the Financial Intelligence Unit as far back as 16 months before public disclosure, and asked why the AML/CFT alerts had allegedly gone unacknowledged.

Citing reports of more than 2,700 Common Electronic Fund Transfer (CEFT) transactions that escaped detection, Karunanayake questioned the failure of the national payment infrastructure including LankaPay to trigger real-time alerts. He sought disclosure of the total dividends withheld during the period, the impact on institutional shareholders such as the Employees’ Provident Fund, the Employees’ Trust Fund and Sri Lanka Insurance Corporation, and an estimate of direct and indirect tax losses to the Treasury.

The MP also asked whether any funds had been transferred overseas or routed through cryptocurrency channels without exchange control approval, and what recovery action was under way. He pressed for figures on the bank’s share-price decline and lost market capitalisation since the fraud became public.

The government asked for two weeks to respond. The intervention is the third distinct accountability track Karunanayake has opened on the NDB case, alongside his April 8 questions on CBSL supervisory failure and his April 14 claim that the fraud pattern has spread to other banks and non-bank financial institutions. It runs in parallel to his separate call for a Parliamentary Select Committee on the US$ 2.5 million Treasury cyber heist.

Source: The Island.