Shasheendra Rajapaksa indicted for allegedly diverting funds meant for the war victims

The former state minister Shasheendra Rajapaksa, a member of Sri Lankas Rajapaksa dynasty, and two others were served with indictments at the Colombo High Court on Tuesday over alleged offences under the Anti-Corruption Act, the latest in a growing list of corruption cases against a family that has faced no reckoning for its role in the genocide of Tamils.

Shasheendra Rajapaksa is the son of the former speaker and minister Chamal Rajapaksa, the elder brother of Mahinda Rajapaksa, and a former member of parliament for Moneragala. The two co-accused are the former acting director general of the Office for Reparations, Sepalika Saman Kumari, and the former director general of the Sri Lanka Mahaweli Authority, Keerthi Bandara Kotagama.

According to the charges, filed by the Commission to Investigate Allegations of Bribery or Corruption (CIABOC) on 19 June, the accused used official influence between 27 November 2023 and 29 May 2024 to pressure officials of the Office for Reparations into approving compensation of Rs 8.85 million for property, including a building unlawfully constructed on land belonging to the Mahaweli Authority in the Sevanagala–Kiriibbanwewa area. The property had been damaged during the unrest of May 2022, at the height of the Aragalaya protests, and the compensation claim had earlier been rejected on the grounds that the land was state-owned.

The case was taken up before High Court Judge Ravindra Premaratne, who, after the indictments were served, released each of the three accused on two sureties of Rs 1 million each, imposed a foreign travel ban and ordered that their fingerprints be taken. The indictment carries ten charges, with the prosecution listing 30 witnesses and 38 documents as evidence, and a pre-trial conference has been fixed for 5 August. Shasheendra Rajapaksa was first arrested over the matter in August 2025.

The institution at the centre of the case lends it a particular resonance. The Office for Reparations was established as a domestic mechanism purportedly to provide redress to the victims of the armed conflict, among them the Tamils of the North-East who lost homes, land and family members, and it is that body the accused are alleged to have leaned upon to secure compensation for a Rajapaksa-linked property built illegally on state land.

The indictment is one of several corruption cases now being pursued against members of the Rajapaksa family under the National Peoples Power (NPP) government, following the arrest of Shasheendras cousin Yoshitha Rajapaksa in a separate CIABOC matter.

Yet as the family is drawn through the courts over money, none of its members has faced any form of accountability for the crimes at the heart of the Tamil demand for justice. Shasheendras uncle, Mahinda Rajapaksa, presided as president over the killing of tens of thousands of Tamils at Mullivaikkal in 2009, in what is widely recognised as a genocide, and neither he nor any other Rajapaksa has been prosecuted for it.