Sri Lanka’s former president was admitted to hospital on Saturday, a day after he was charged with using public funds to finance private international travel, as the government intensified its crackdown on corruption.
Ranil Wickremesinghe, 76, was remanded in custody on Friday after being accused of using taxpayers’ money to pay for a two-day visit to the UK in September 2023 to attend a ceremony at the University of Wolverhampton granting an honorary professorship to his wife.
Wickremesinghe has denied the misuse of state money, and said his wife paid her own travel expenses. The visit took place upon Wickremesinghe’s return from the G77 summit in Havana and the UN general assembly in New York.
The offences carry a maximum punishment of 20 years in jail and an estimated fine of 16.6m rupees (£41,000).
Wickremesinghe, who lost Sri Lanka’s last presidential election in September to the leftist leader Anura Kumara Dissanayake, was said to be in stable condition after being brought to Colombo National hospital. The hospital’s deputy head, Rukshan Bellana, told the Agence France-Presse news agency that he had to be treated for acute dehydration. “He was a severe diabetic with high blood pressure when he was brought in,” Bellana said.
Wickremesinghe became president in July 2022 after Gotabaya Rajapaksa’s resignation following months of protests driven by the country’s worst economic downturn since independence. Before assuming the presidency, Wickremesinghe, unpopular with protesters as he was seen as an ally of the Rajapaksa clan, had been prime minister six times since entering politics in 1977, though he never completed a term.
In a significant political shift for the country last September, Wickremesinghe was replaced by Dissanayake, the head of the leftist Janatha Vimukthi Peramuna (JVP) party. The JVP has been tarred by its past involvement in some of the worst violence in the country’s history, and Dissanayake had sought to soften some of his party’s more hardline positions while attracting voters with promises to tackle corruption and abuses of power.