Sri Lanka’s former President Ranil Wickremesinghe arrested

Sri Lanka’s former President and six-time Premier Ranil Wickremesinghe was on Friday (August 22, 2025) arrested on charges misusing state funds during his Presidency. The 76-year-old leader was remanded in custody until August 26, 2025, when the next hearing is due.

A senior official told The Hindu that Mr. Wickremesinghe was taken into custody after the Sri Lanka Police’s Criminal Investigation Department questioned him about his visit to a British university in September 2023 when he was head of state, to attend a ceremony where his wife, a senior academic, was honoured.

Mr. Wickremesinghe’s party has denied any misuse of state funds in connection with the visit. The former President, while returning from the G-77 summit in Cuba, had travelled to the United States to address the United Nations General Assembly in New York, and later stopped over in the United Kingdom, where he also held diplomatic meetings, his office earlier said.

The development marks the first instance of a former President being arrested in Sri Lanka and comes amid the government’s efforts to probe corruption. Several senior politicians and officials have been arrested in the last few months.

Mr. Wickremesinghe, leader of the centre-right United National Party, one of Sri Lanka’s oldest political parties, was elected President in an urgent Parliamentary vote after former President Gotabaya Rajapaksa quit office in July 2022, in the wake of a citizen’s uprising sparked by an economic crash. Mr. Wickremesinghe helmed the country’s top office for two years, and is credited with steering the crisis-hit island nation towards recovery. He ran for the presidency in 2024, and lost to Anura Kumara Dissanayake, who won on an anti-corruption plank.

Former President Maithripala Sirisena, several politicians and opposition parliamentarians, including Namal Rajapaksa, son of former President Mahinda Rajapaksa, were seen at the Colombo Magistrate Court premises on Friday. While some former politicians and Opposition figures slammed the government for arresting a former head of state, Minister of Public Security Ananda Wijepala told Parliament that the law was being “applied equally” to everyone.

Friday’s arrest is the second major setback for the former President in recent months. Last month, Sri Lanka’s Supreme Court ruled that the State of Emergency declared by him in 2022, as Acting President, was “unconstitutional and violated fundamental human rights”.