Sri Lanka, July 17 -- The report of a Parliamentary oversight committee into a two and a half million United States dollar fraud on Sri Lanka's foreign debt payments was tabled in Parliament recently by the Chairman of the Committee on Public Finance, Dr Harsha de Silva.

The Committee found that the fraud was not a one-off lapse, but the product of governance, procedural and operational failures across several institutions.

Over a period of roughly four months, from November of last year, a criminal group compromised the email system of the External Resources Department, impersonated Australia's export credit agency using a lookalike internet domain, and collected two and a half million United States dollars in Sri Lankan sovereign debt...