Anti-graft officials said they have arrested the former head of the national airline on charges of conspiring to accept bribes from Airbus over a multi-million-dollar deal.
Kapila Chandrasena, who was CEO of SriLankan Airlines during a 2013 deal to purchase 10 aircraft worth US$2.3bil, was arrested on Thursday and remanded in custody, officials said.
“He conspired to accept a bribe of US$16mil and received €1.45mil into a bank account in Singapore,” an official of Sri Lanka’s Commission to Investigate Allegations of Bribery or Corruption said.
Prosecutors say Chandrasena created a shell company in Brunei in his wife’s name and arranged for the kickback to be paid into its Singapore account.
Sri Lanka’s national carrier is saddled with debt, with estimated accumulated losses of 596 billion rupees (US$1.9bil) at the end of March last year. Attempts to sell the airline have so far failed.
Chandrasena was previously arrested and released on bail in February 2020 in a similar but separate case. At that time, the United States, Britain and France named him in a joint investigation into Airbus business deals.
In January 2020, a French court approved a fine of €3.6bil to be paid by the European aircraft manufacturer to settle the probes. — AFP
