Colombo: Sri Lanka’s former president Gotabaya Rajapaksa will return to the island nation next week after fleeing in July amid mass protests, local broadcaster Newsfirst reported on Wednesday, citing a former ambassador.
Udayanga Weeratunga, a former Sri Lankan envoy to Russia who is related to Rajapaksa, said he will arrive in Sri Lanka on August 24, Newsfirst reported.
Rajapaksa, the first Sri Lankan president to quit mid-term, is temporarily sheltering in Thailand, after fleeing Sri Lanka on a military plane to the Maldives and then spending weeks in Singapore.
He resigned from office soon after arriving in Singapore, facing public anger over his government’s handling of Sri Lanka’s worst economic crisis since independence from Britain in 1948.
Rajapaksa has made no public appearances or comment since leaving Sri Lanka. Reuters was not able to immediately contact him or Weeratunga.
The office of Rajapaksa’s successor, Ranil Wickremesinghe, who suggested last month that the former president refrain from returning to Sri Lanka in the near future, did not immediately respond for a request for comment.
“I don’t believe it’s the time for him to return,” Wickremesinghe told the Wall Street Journal in an interview on July 31. “I have no indication of him returning soon.”
No extension of emergency
Sri Lanka’s state of emergency imposed in the middle of last month will not be extended beyond this week, President Ranil Wickremesinghe’s media office said on Tuesday, as protests against the country’s economic devastation petered out.
Lawmakers voted Wickremesinghe in as president on July 20 after his predecessor, Gotabaya Rajapaksa, fled a popular uprising against months of acute shortages of fuel, food and medicine.
Six-time Prime Minister Wickremesinghe imposed the emergency from July 18 when he was acting president, after tens of thousands of people stormed into government buildings, seeking solutions to the country’s worst economic crisis in more than seven decades.
Wickremesinghe’s office cited the president as saying at an event in the main city of Colombo that the emergency would lapse this week.
He has sought peace and political support to help advance bailout talks with the International Monetary Fund. The country has already defaulted on its sovereign debt.
S&P Global on Monday slashed its rating on Sri Lankan bonds to ‘D’, representing default, after the country missed interest payments due on June 3, June 28, and July 18, and a principal payment due on July 25.
The country is considering restructuring its local and foreign debt in the hope of securing a $3 billion IMF loan.
