Sri Lanka, July 23 -- The Central Bank of Sri Lanka today (23) made public the detailed submissions it had earlier placed before the Committee on Public Finance, on the USD 2.5 million fraud on the country's foreign debt payments. The picture that emerges is a devastating one for the Ministry of Finance.

In its submissions, the Central Bank told the Committee that the root cause of the fraud was, in its own phrase, "totally outside" the institution. The theft, it said, and again these are its words, "was directly precipitated by tampered payment instructions generated from the compromised email system at the Ministry of Finance." The Bank's submissions describe the Ministry's account of events as, in five separate places, "factually inco...