NEW YORK: The U.S. is doing a small developing country’s dirty work in prosecuting its ex-ambassador for fraud, and it may eventually be cause for discomfort along Embassy Row.
In normal cases, for a foreign diplomat with an instinct for pilfering from their own government, Washington represents a safe posting. Far from home, entertainment expenses can be padded, real estate prices exaggerated, lobbying and PR-consultant fees manipulated. The only thing the bean-counters back at the foreign ministry need to know is that the American capital is an expensive place. Thanks to diplomatic immunity, whatever workplace scams get cooked up are unlikely to interest the local authorities here.
Still, an unusual proceeding that quietly concluded in a federal courtroom this week suggests there are limits, even with immunity.
The case of former Sri Lankan Ambassador Jaliya Wickramasuriya, who pleaded guilty to defrauding his own government out of $332,000, has gotten significant play in his crisis-stricken home country, where anti-corruption protests this month ousted the president. One of the major complaints against the now-former leader (and his brother, another former president; and their brother, the just-ousted finance minister; and their other brother, a former speaker of parliament) was that they filled the government with crooked relatives.
Case in point: The ex-ambassador, a cousin.
In the Sri Lankan press, the fact that the scam had to be prosecuted by the U.S. government — rather than by the government the ambassador actually cheated — has become a sad part of the larger narrative about nepotism and corruption in the nearly two decades that members of the extended Rajapaksa family have dominated national politics.
But in Washington, where the proceedings drew almost no coverage, a foreign envoy facing the American judicial system for stealing from his own treasury is actually a novel phenomenon, and potentially an important one — a spectacle that’s highly unconventional both as a matter of international law and international relations. In addition to offering a rare peek behind embassy walls, the Justice Department’s case against the envoy might just represent a cautionary precedent for future would-be diplomatic chislers.
