Nirupama Rajapaksa was a parliamentarian and minister for water from 2010 to 2015 and is a cousin of the current president of Sri Lanka, Gotabaya Rajapaksa.
Her husband, Thirukumar Nadesan, a hotel entrepreneur and business consultant, was involved in an ongoing judicial investigation in 2016, together with another member of the presidential family, Basil Rajapaksa, an MP and current Minister of Finance.
Investigated for misappropriation of funds in a controversial real estate transaction, both deny the charges.
Former minister Nirupama Rajapaksa and her husband Nadesan, as documented by the Pandora Papers, are the actual economic beneficiaries of an offshore company, managed by a Singapore trust firm, used to purchase luxury residences in London and Sydney, Australia. The anonymous real estate safe is still active in 2019, when the available documents stop.
Nadesan has used many other trusts and offshore companies, moreover, to secretly get paid for very rich consultancy from foreign companies that have done business with the Sri Lankan government. Some of its offshore companies then bought precious works of art, exported abroad. In 2018, in particular, Pacific Commodities, secretly controlled by Nadesan, transferred 31 Asian paintings and other works of art to the free port of Geneva, where it is possible to keep masterpieces of painting or sculpture anonymously, without being registered and without declaring anything to the taxman.
In a series of confidential emails received from Asiacity Trust’s trustees in Singapore, the Nadesan accountant wrote that his total assets already amounted to over $ 160 million in 2011, when his wife was in government.
