By – Robinhood
April 16, LNW (Colombo):Thirteen point two billion rupees has vanished from NDB Bank. The public knows almost nothing about how. The Board has offered no press conference, no detailed explanation, no credible accountability statement. The silence from the institution’s leadership has been as damaging as the fraud itself.
At the center of that silence sits Sriyan Cooray, the bank’s Chairman and one of Sri Lanka’s most recognisable rugby figures. Cooray built his reputation on the field and in the stands at CR and FC, the club he has championed with visible passion for years. That passion, unfortunately, does not appear to have extended to the governance of the institution he chairs.
Sources familiar with the bank’s internal operations indicate that Cooray used his position to pressure the bank’s marketing division into securing a long-term sponsorship arrangement for CR and FC. If accurate, that is not a minor lapse in judgment.
That is a textbook conflict of interest, a chairman directing institutional resources toward an organisation he personally involved and publicly champions.
The contrast is difficult to ignore. The same energy and follow-through that Cooray reportedly applied to securing that sponsorship deal was never applied to the risk controls that should have caught a fraud building quietly inside his own institution. A 290 million rupee irregularity surfaced in January. No total audit followed. No public reckoning came. The damage compounded to 13.2 billion.
Rugby teaches its players one principle above all others, that is when the team is losing, the captain does not pass the ball and look away. Cooray has spent decades understanding that.
His depositors are still waiting for him to apply it and the Central Bank of Sri Lanka is passing the ball too happily.