The Sunday Times Sri Lanka and the Wijewardene Family: From the Lake House Press Dynasty to a Century-Long Network of Private Media Power in Sri Lanka

1. The first issue to clarify is the meaning of “founder”: there are in fact three different layers of founding.

The most common mistake in researching The Sunday Times Sri Lanka is to treat D. R. Wijewardene, Ranjit Wijewardene and Vijitha Yapa as founders in the same sense.

The first layer is Don Richard Wijewardene, or D. R. Wijewardene (1886–1950), the real patriarch of the Wijewardene press dynasty. He entered newspaper publishing during the colonial era, acquired Dinamina in 1914, developed the Ceylon Daily News in 1918, and consolidated his newspapers in 1926 into the Associated Newspapers of Ceylon Limited, or ANCL, better known as Lake House. D. R. was therefore the origin of more than a century of Wijewardene media influence, but he was not the direct founder of the modern Sunday Times Sri Lanka.

The second layer is Ranjit Sujiva Wijewardene, D. R.’s younger son and the founder of the modern Wijeya Newspapers Limited, or WNL. WNL was established in 1979. After acquiring publishing rights and other assets associated with the defunct Times Group, Ranjit launched Irida Lankadeepa in 1986 and launched or relaunched The Sunday Times on June 7, 1987. For the newspaper that exists today, the most accurate publishing-founder formulation is therefore Ranjit Wijewardene and Wijeya Newspapers.

The third layer is Vijitha Yapa, founder editor of the modern Sunday Times. Yapa recalled that a conversation with Ranjit Wijewardene in October 1986 resulted in an offer to become the founder editor. Recruitment and training began in November, and after more than six months of preparation the first issue appeared on June 7, 1987.

There is an important conflict in the secondary literature. Some references give 1991 as the founding year of the present Sunday Times. However, first-person accounts by both publisher Ranjit Wijewardene and founder editor Vijitha Yapa, as well as the WNL corporate chronology reported by the Media Ownership Monitor, point clearly to 1987.

The accounts differ; for the modern WNL Sunday Times, the evidence for June 7, 1987 is substantially stronger.

The three roles can therefore be summarized as follows:

D. R. Wijewardene = founder of the family press dynasty; Ranjit Wijewardene = founder of WNL and publishing founder of the modern Sunday Times; Vijitha Yapa = founder editor of the modern Sunday Times.

2. The family origins: the Wijewardenes did not enter journalism from a position of poverty; they converted commercial capital, Buddhist elite status and colonial education into media power.

D. R. Wijewardene was born on February 23, 1886, into a prominent family associated with Sedawatte/Sedavatta, near Colombo. His father, Don Philip Wijewardene, was a successful timber merchant. His mother, Helena Weerasinghe Wijewardene, became an important Buddhist philanthropist and was closely associated with the revival of the Kelaniya Raja Maha Vihara. The family therefore possessed commercial wealth, property and social standing and was connected to the Sinhala Buddhist elite.

This is essential to understanding the dynasty. Its media power was built through a chain of conversion:

traditional commercial wealth → elite British education → nationalist political networks → newspaper capital.

D. R. lost his father while still young and grew up in a large family under the influence of his mother and wider kinship network. He later married Alice Gertrude Ruby Meedeniya, further linking the family to prominent Ceylonese social circles.

These marriage networks became even more consequential in the next generation. D. R.’s daughter Nalini Wijewardene married Esmond Wickremesinghe. Their son was Ranil Wickremesinghe, who later served repeatedly as prime minister and as Sri Lanka’s president from 2022 to 2024. Ranjit Wijewardene is therefore Ranil’s maternal uncle. Reporters Without Borders has explicitly used this relationship as an example of kinship between powerful private media owners and political elites in Sri Lanka.

D. R.’s sister Agnes Helen married into the Jayewardene family, and their son J. R. Jayewardene later became president. The Wijewardenes therefore sit inside a broader elite network connecting the Wijewardene, Wickremesinghe, Jayewardene and Senanayake families.

Ranjit himself married Ranjini Neela Senanayake. The Media Ownership Monitor identifies her as a descendant of D. S. Senanayake, the first prime minister of Ceylon. Their son Ruwan Wijewardene later entered politics and served, among other positions, as State Minister of Defence. Another son, Parakrama Sujan Wijewardene, entered the family businesses and became Deputy Chairman of WNL.

The family’s genuinely scarce resource has therefore never been money alone. Its long-term position rests on the accumulation of four forms of capital:

commercial capital, political kinship, elite education and mass-media platforms.

That helps explain why the family was able to build a second major media enterprise after losing control of the first.

3. D. R. Wijewardene’s education and intellectual formation: he was educated within the colonial elite system and then turned that education into an instrument of anti-colonial politics.

D. R. studied at S. Thomas’ College, Mutwal, and later at Peterhouse, University of Cambridge, before receiving legal training and becoming a barrister of the Inner Temple.

Law was not the only influence.

While in Britain, he encountered the emerging Indian nationalist movement. Accounts repeatedly mention figures such as Lala Lajpat Rai and Bipin Chandra Pal. For a young man from British Ceylon, observing how Indian nationalism was being organized from the imperial center was a formative political experience.

His later behavior suggests that he reached a distinctive strategic conclusion: rather than becoming merely a prominent political speaker, he could build institutions capable of continuously manufacturing, organizing and distributing political consciousness.

That institution became Lake House.

After returning to Ceylon in 1912, he briefly practiced law but increasingly devoted himself to constitutional reform and political organization. He became secretary of the Ceylon National Association in 1913 and later participated in the Ceylon Reform League and the Ceylon National Congress.

His entry into newspaper publishing was therefore not an accidental career switch.

He understood the newspaper as political infrastructure.

A politician could fall from power, and a speech could reach only a crowd, but a daily newspaper could enter thousands of homes every morning and influence which issues mattered, which concepts were repeated and which political actors gained legitimacy.

This was the original intellectual foundation of Wijewardene media power.

4. D. R.’s entrepreneurial model: rather than starting every publication from scratch, he repeatedly acquired distressed media assets and industrialized them.

In 1914, the Sinhala daily Dinamina was in financial difficulty. D. R. and his brother D. C. Wijewardene acquired its rights and redeveloped the newspaper.

In 1918, he acquired the troubled English-language newspaper The Ceylonese. According to Lake House’s official history, he paid founder Sir Ponnambalam Arunachalam Rs. 16,000 for the paper, plant and goodwill and rebuilt it as the Ceylon Daily News / Daily News.

This transaction illustrates his method:

buy a distressed but recognizable media asset → inject capital → improve editorial and production quality → reduce price → expand circulation → increase advertising value through scale.

Lake House’s history specifically notes that he once cut the price of his newspaper in half, accepting a lower margin per copy in exchange for greater sales. That is essentially a classic mass-media scale economy: larger circulation spreads fixed production costs while raising the value of the advertising inventory.

D. R. subsequently added other English-, Sinhala- and Tamil-language titles, including the historic Observer.

In 1926, these assets were consolidated into the Associated Newspapers of Ceylon Limited. By 1929 the company had moved into the purpose-built Lake House premises beside Beira Lake. The official history records that D. R.’s interests in the joint-stock company were valued at around Rs. 600,000, while other family interests represented about Rs. 100,000. These are historical nominal figures and should not be treated as present-day wealth equivalents.

By the 1930s, Lake House was producing publications in English, Sinhala and Tamil, involving different scripts and multiple daily and weekly titles.

D. R. had therefore built not merely a newspaper but an early Sri Lankan media infrastructure platform combining newsrooms, journalists, printing plants, paper procurement, advertising, nationwide distribution, brands, political networks and multilingual production.

That operating knowledge became one of the most important intangible inheritances available to his son Ranjit decades later.

5. D. R.’s greatest achievement was turning newspaper publishing from individual proprietorship into an organized, capital-intensive opinion industry.

First, he demonstrated that a locally owned Ceylonese enterprise could build a commercially sustainable national press group. The early newspaper market contained many financially fragile publications; D. R. transformed publishing into an enterprise based on capital, fixed assets, portfolio strategy and multilingual scale.

Second, he linked the newspaper business with nationalist politics. A 2026 Sunday Times republication of the recollections of longtime employee E. E. C. Abayasekara cited biographer H. A. J. Hulugalle’s judgment that few Ceylonese figures of the first half of the twentieth century exercised such pervasive influence.

Third, his personal style differed markedly from that of the modern celebrity media entrepreneur. Contemporary recollections emphasize his aversion to personal publicity. He generally preferred Lake House, public causes and national questions to remain in the foreground while he stayed behind the scenes.

His objective was therefore less a personal “influencer brand” than institutionalized influence.

The key was not that everybody knew D. R.’s face.

The key was that large numbers of people read newspapers controlled by the institution he had built.

That is a more durable form of power.

6. Ranjit Wijewardene’s upbringing: he did not have to invent the operating system of newspaper publishing; he grew up inside it.

Ranjit Sujiva Wijewardene was born on June 30, 1937. He was D. R. Wijewardene’s younger son. He was only around thirteen when his father died in 1950.

His childhood therefore coincided with the high point of the Lake House system.

Instead of growing up in an ordinary commercial household, he was surrounded by a business that dealt every day with political news, advertisers, printing machinery, journalists, nationwide distribution and government relations.

His educational path strongly resembled his father’s: S. Thomas’ College, followed by Peterhouse, Cambridge. Peterhouse alumni material confirms that Ranjit matriculated in 1956. Secondary biographical accounts report a Cambridge MA in 1959, although the precise subject is not securely documented in the available material.

His field of study: public information is limited / presently cannot be confirmed.

The significance of Cambridge was not simply credentialism.

Ranjit inherited three forms of capability:

the accumulated media-business knowledge of his father;

the editorial and political networks developed by figures such as Esmond Wickremesinghe;

and the international social and managerial perspective associated with elite British education.

When he later lost Lake House and created a new media group, he was therefore rebuilding from a deep stock of industry knowledge rather than starting from zero.

7. Ranjit’s first career phase: inheritance of Lake House was followed by a state takeover that effectively removed the family from control of its original media empire.

After D. R.’s death in 1950, Lake House passed through a transitional management period. ANCL’s official history states that one of the central figures shaping editorial policy was D. R.’s son-in-law and Ranjit’s brother-in-law, Esmond Wickremesinghe.

There are minor differences among secondary accounts about the exact year in which Ranjit formally assumed command, but ANCL’s own history states that Ranjit Wijewardene took command of the company in 1962.

He was then only around twenty-four or twenty-five.

His first truly consequential professional responsibility was therefore not an entry-level corporate role but leadership of his father’s national newspaper company.

The decisive event of his career, however, was not inheritance. It was loss.

In 1973, Sri Lanka enacted the Associated Newspapers of Ceylon Limited (Special Provisions) Law No. 28 of 1973. Effective July 20, 1973, the law required at least 75 percent of ANCL’s shares to vest in the Public Trustee on behalf of the government and imposed limits on individual shareholdings.

This was far more than a normal corporate transaction.

It removed control of an enterprise the Wijewardene family had spent roughly half a century building.

Interpretations of the political motivation remain contested. Supporters of the measure emphasized excessive private concentration of press power; critics have argued that Lake House’s political stance and its links with UNP elites were important factors.

Accounts differ.

The legal result, however, is clear: Lake House moved from family-controlled private media to government-controlled media. Later ANCL reporting showed the Public Trustee holding about 87.56 percent, while Ranjit himself retained only about 0.57 percent.

This was the most important turning point of his life.

8. The 1979 restart: the real significance of Wijeya Newspapers is that Ranjit built a second media empire after losing the first.

Rather than making restoration of Lake House the only route back into media ownership, Ranjit established a new privately controlled publishing company, Wijeya Publications Limited, later Wijeya Newspapers Limited, in 1979.

The entrepreneurial challenge was fundamentally different from his father’s.

D. R. had had to create a locally controlled national newspaper company in a colonial market.

Ranjit had to reconstruct printing capacity, brands, journalists, advertisers, circulation and market share after the family had lost its original media base.

It was, in effect, a second founding of the dynasty.

A crucial opportunity came from another distressed legacy newspaper organization: the Times of Ceylon / Times Group.

In his Sunday Times silver-jubilee account, Ranjit explained that the publishing rights of Times Group newspapers in liquidation had been acquired earlier and that the “Times” name still possessed familiarity among English-reading households.

The resemblance to his father’s strategy is striking.

D. R. had acquired distressed Dinamina and The Ceylonese.

Decades later, Ranjit acquired or secured rights associated with a defunct Times Group.

One of the most successful recurring Wijewardene strategies was therefore not merely creating entirely new brands, but buying legacy media assets that retained recognition despite business failure and then re-commercializing them.

9. Why The Sunday Times appeared in 1987: its original business logic was more practical than romantic.

Ranjit was unusually candid in his 2012 anniversary account: the decision to launch an English Sunday newspaper was not driven by a grandiose sense of mission.

It was also an exercise in asset utilization.

First, WNL had acquired rights associated with the old Times Group, giving it a recognizable legacy name.

Second, the company possessed unused printing-machine capacity. Newspaper presses are expensive fixed assets. Idle press time is economically inefficient, so an additional weekend title improves utilization.

Third, WNL was already publishing the Sinhala Sunday newspaper Irida Lankadeepa.

Running an English Sunday paper alongside it meant that printing, distribution and commercial infrastructure could be shared. Advertisers could also be offered a multilingual package rather than a single weekly advertising vehicle. Ranjit explicitly described the economics in terms of cost distribution and a more attractive advertising proposition.

The founding economics of The Sunday Times can therefore be reduced to:

legacy brand rights + spare printing capacity + existing distribution + bundled advertising + a new editorial team.

It was a classic example of incubation inside an established media group.

10. Vijitha Yapa transformed the business proposition into a distinct editorial product.

Ranjit recruited Vijitha Yapa as founder editor.

Yapa accepted in October 1986, began recruiting in November and assembled an early staff that included Lucien Rajakarunanayake, Kris Rezel, K. Nadarajah and Gordon Heyzer, among others.

The team had more than six months to prepare.

Yapa had visited the Atlanta operation of USA Today in February 1986, and the new Sunday Times borrowed aspects of USA Today’s visual approach, including a blue masthead and elements of typography and layout. Ranjit likewise identified USA Today as a model for appearance and content.

The paper was therefore not conceived simply as another austere British-style broadsheet.

It combined English-language political coverage with stronger visual presentation, opinion, investigations and a broad “family newspaper” positioning.

Yapa later recalled that within weeks the paper had become Sri Lanka’s second-largest Sunday newspaper by circulation. This should be treated as a retrospective first-person claim rather than as independently audited current circulation data.

More important was the talent effect.

The early Sunday Times became a platform for journalists including D. B. S. Jeyaraj, Lasantha Wickrematunga, Iqbal Athas and J. S. Tissainayagam. Yapa authorized Lasantha to write sensitive political commentary under the pseudonym “Suranimala.”

The Sunday Times therefore accumulated an asset beyond readership:

it became an informal training ground and network hub for political journalism.

A number of people who later founded other publications, became internationally recognized journalists or entered public life passed through its newsroom.

11. WNL’s expansion shows that The Sunday Times was never an isolated asset; it became an English flagship within a multilingual portfolio.

The main sequence was:

1979: creation of Wijeya Publications/Wijeya Newspapers.

1986: launch of the Sinhala Sunday paper Irida Lankadeepa.

1987: launch/relaunch of The Sunday Times.

1991: launch of the Sinhala daily Lankadeepa.

Mid-to-late 1990s: expansion of the English daily business; Midweek Mirror ultimately evolved into the Daily Mirror, which became a daily title in 1999.

The group subsequently expanded into business news, Tamil media, women’s and children’s publications, lifestyle publishing, recruitment, education and digital video.

Media Ownership Monitor records a broad WNL-related portfolio including The Sunday Times, Daily Mirror, Lankadeepa, Irida Lankadeepa, Daily FT and multiple specialist publications and websites. WNL’s current corporate site continues to present Daily Mirror, Financial Times/Daily FT and The Sunday Times as important parts of its English-language publishing portfolio. As of August 2026, The Sunday Times website remains active across news, editorials, political commentary, Business Times, sport, education, magazines, Sunday Times 2 and e-paper offerings.

Its position within the group is therefore distinctive.

The Sunday Times is not necessarily the WNL title with the largest mass Sinhala audience. It is an influence-heavy English flagship with disproportionate reach into business, policy, diplomatic and internationally connected readerships.

Its value cannot be measured by copy sales alone.

12. The real asset base is broader than newspapers: the family is associated with a media-printing-property-tourism-technology portfolio.

Media Ownership Monitor’s review of company records and information supplied by WNL identified a series of associated interests beyond the newspaper company itself.

In printing and publishing, these include Stamford Lake and Lake House Printers and Publishers.

In real estate or land-related activities, the list includes LH Plantations.

Tourism interests include Ranweli Holiday Village and Sarathi Tours.

Service and recruitment interests include Sarathi Ltd.

Technology and printing support include Wijeya Graphics.

Other corporate profiles have also associated Ranjit with Lake House Bookshop, R. S. Printek and Freudenberg & Co. (Ceylon) in director or chairman capacities.

It is useful to distinguish two kinds of assets.

The first category is property-like commercial assets:

equity in WNL, printing machinery, printing companies, tourism properties, land, publishing companies and technology businesses.

The second is influence assets:

mastheads such as The Sunday Times, Lankadeepa and Daily Mirror;

decades of archives;

nationwide distribution relationships;

advertising-client relationships;

journalistic and editorial networks;

access to political and business elites;

multilingual agenda-setting capacity;

and accumulated public familiarity with the brands.

These influence assets are difficult to value fully on a balance sheet but may be more important to a media dynasty than the physical presses themselves.

The latest beneficial ownership and aggregate valuation of every private affiliated company, and the personal net worth of the Wijewardene family: public information is limited / presently cannot be confirmed.

13. Capital relationships: this is not a typical venture-capital, private-equity or listed-media story; it is a highly concentrated family-capital structure.

Media Ownership Monitor, using and reconfirming 2017 company-registry information, reported that:

Ranjit Sujiva Wijewardene held approximately 89.99 percent of WNL, while Parakrama Sujan Wijewardene held approximately 10 percent.

Tiny residual holdings were associated with other family members and related individuals, leaving the company effectively under family control. MOM explicitly stated that the ownership structure was reconfirmed through annual returns from Sri Lanka’s Department of Registrar of Companies. The key caution is that the underlying registry data were chiefly from 2017, so these percentages should not automatically be treated as a precise 2026 cap table.

WNL therefore differs sharply from many contemporary digital-media ventures.

There is no obvious dependence on:

venture capital;

large international investment funds;

public equity markets;

or strategic technology-company investors.

Its core resources have instead been:

family equity + operating cash flow + printing infrastructure + distribution + a portfolio of brands.

That has one major advantage: management does not have to organize the business around the exit timetable of outside investors.

It also has an obvious governance implication: under highly concentrated family ownership, capital control and potential editorial authority are institutionally close to each other.

That is why any serious study of WNL has to examine the Wijewardene family as well as the newsroom.

14. WNL’s business model evolved from “selling newspapers” into monetizing the same reader and advertiser across multiple media properties.

In a detailed WAN-IFRA interview in 2018, Ranjit described the economics of the group.

The traditional pillars were still:

circulation revenue and advertising revenue.

Advertising had experienced volatility; print circulation and reach were relatively stable but showing some declines, while part of revenue growth came from higher cover prices for Sinhala daily and Sunday titles. Digital revenue was growing, but much more slowly than digital reach.

One of WNL’s major business moats was physical distribution.

Ranjit said that, in addition to its branch network, the group served readers through about 5,000 dealer or agency outlets around the island.

For print media, content is not the only barrier to entry.

The ability to place a physical newspaper across a national retail network every morning is itself a capital-intensive competitive advantage.

In the same interview, Ranjit said that Daily Mirror, Lankadeepa, Sunday Lankadeepa and The Sunday Times together accounted for more than 70 percent in the relevant measures of readership, reach and revenue generation versus competitors. Because this was a claim by the company chairman, it should be treated as a company assertion rather than a current independent market audit.

A more independent picture comes from the RSF/Verité Media Ownership Monitor. Using 2017 Kantar data, it found that newspapers controlled by the Wijewardene family reached close to half of Sri Lanka’s print readership, while the four largest print owners collectively represented about 75 percent.

The economic model can therefore be summarized as follows:

use several brands to capture different languages and social segments, then package those audiences for advertisers.

The Sunday Times serves an influential English Sunday audience;

Daily Mirror serves daily English news consumption;

Lankadeepa provides scale in the Sinhala market;

financial and lifestyle brands attract high-value vertical advertising;

and digital/video products re-capture younger users.

This is considerably safer than depending on one newspaper.

15. Digital transition: Ranjit did not simply abandon print; WNL attempted to extend its existing print cash flows into digital, video and integrated advertising.

By 2018, WNL reported around 2.5 million unique visitors across its digital platforms, with about 35 percent accessing through smartphones. Its combined social-media following was also reported above 2.5 million. These are 2018 figures, not current 2026 metrics.

WNL did not then believe the mass Sri Lankan market was ready for a comprehensive paywall. Its websites remained largely free while it worked on a paid e-paper product. Ranjit said that if a paywall were eventually adopted, he preferred a freemium approach in which some premium material would be paid while most content remained free.

The company was also experimenting with:

native advertising;

e-paper technology;

augmented reality;

virtual reality;

bots;

research collaboration with SLIIT;

the video product WNow;

and the lifestyle/video venture Hi!TV.

The common logic is clear.

WNL was not attempting to become a pure technology business.

It was converting an established advertiser relationship into an integrated offering across:

Print + Web + Social + Video + TV + Native Advertising.

Ranjit was explicit that part of the purpose of Hi!TV was to enter electronic media so that advertisers could be offered 360-degree solutions.

The core of WNL’s digital strategy was therefore the expansion of advertising inventory and client solutions rather than an immediate subscription-first transformation.

16. The Sunday Times’ journalistic value: one of its most important assets is a reputation built through high-risk political and defence reporting.

From its early years, The Sunday Times operated in the high-pressure space between government, military power and investigative journalism.

The founding newsroom produced exclusives associated with the arrival of the Indian Peace Keeping Force and the volatile India–Sri Lanka relationship. Yapa recalled that Sunday Times reporters were among the few Colombo journalists positioned in Jaffna when the IPKF arrived.

The internationally best-known example is Iqbal Athas.

Athas served for years as a defence correspondent and columnist for The Sunday Times, investigating arms procurement and military affairs. In 1998, armed men entered his home and threatened him and his family. CPJ later reported that two Sri Lankan Air Force officers were sentenced in 2002 to nine years in prison for their role in the raid, which the court regarded as an effort to suppress Athas’s reporting on military corruption.

In 2007, Athas again faced threats, surveillance and political pressure following an investigation into a MiG-27 aircraft procurement deal. CPJ repeatedly called on the Sri Lankan government to protect him.

This demonstrates that The Sunday Times’ influence was not an abstract branding exercise.

On questions involving the civil war, arms procurement, government misconduct and political conflict, it developed investigative capacity capable of provoking responses from powerful state institutions.

That helps explain why its political importance in the English-language sphere has often exceeded what raw circulation alone might imply.

17. Yet the newspaper was not free from owner intervention: the resignation of founder editor Vijitha Yapa remains the clearest internal controversy.

One of the most important disputes involved Vijitha Yapa and Ranjit Wijewardene.

Lasantha Wickrematunga was then writing the sharp political column Suranimala under a pseudonym. Yapa recalled that President Ranasinghe Premadasa publicly attacked the newspaper and its leadership over political coverage and that Ranjit subsequently asked him to stop the column. Yapa regarded this as editorial interference and chose to resign.

In a publisher’s note attached to Yapa’s anniversary article, Ranjit said he did not remember asking for the column to be withdrawn, while acknowledging that Yapa might regard this failure of memory as convenient. The column in fact continued after Yapa’s departure.

Ranjit was even more revealing in his own anniversary essay. He admitted that he had sometimes weakened or cut strong stories because he tended to err on the side of caution, and he wrote that Yapa left believing his continued editorship might expose the newspaper to “unfriendly Government fire” and jeopardize its future.

This episode reveals the central structural tension of WNL:

the proprietor may value independent journalism while simultaneously being responsible for ensuring that a capital-intensive newspaper survives hostile government pressure.

For a domestic media company dependent on local advertisers, printing inputs, taxation, regulation and political conditions, that conflict can be acute.

The evidence therefore does not justify reducing The Sunday Times to “a paper completely controlled by its owner.”

Nor does it justify an idealized claim that owner intervention has never occurred.

Both forces have existed.

18. Another major controversy was editor Sinha Ratnatunga’s criminal-defamation case involving President Chandrika Kumaratunga.

After Yapa’s departure, Sinha Ratnatunga became editor and played a major role in shaping The Sunday Times for many years.

In 1995, the paper published a report or gossip item concerning President Chandrika Bandaranaike Kumaratunga’s attendance at a private birthday party. The article triggered a criminal-defamation prosecution.

In 1997, Ratnatunga was convicted and received a total 18-month prison sentence, suspended for seven years. The Committee to Protect Journalists treated the case as an important example of Sri Lankan criminal-defamation law being used against the press.

The case has to be understood in two dimensions.

The underlying report itself contained factual problems, so the controversy should not be romanticized as punishment for a wholly accurate investigative exposé.

At the same time, international press-freedom groups strongly criticized the use of criminal penalties carrying the threat of imprisonment against editors. CPJ argued that such sanctions inevitably create a chilling effect.

The episode captures an important lesson in The Sunday Times’ history:

the fact that journalism can be wrong does not eliminate press freedom; correcting errors and using the criminal law to intimidate journalists are separate questions.

19. The largest structural controversy surrounding the Wijewardenes is not a single scandal but the overlap between media ownership and political-family networks.

One of the central findings of the RSF–Verité Media Ownership Monitor was that Sri Lanka combines highly concentrated media ownership with extensive political connections among proprietors.

The Wijewardene family is one of the clearest cases:

Ranjit is Ranil Wickremesinghe’s uncle;

Ranjit’s wife belongs to the Senanayake political family;

their son Ruwan entered UNP politics and government;

and D. R.’s wider family was linked by kinship to J. R. Jayewardene and other political elites.

MOM also noted that Sri Lankan law did not comprehensively prevent parliamentarians or relatives of political figures from owning media and lacked sufficiently strong conflict-of-interest safeguards for media ownership.

A crucial distinction must nevertheless be maintained:

political kinship does not by itself prove that a politician dictates the daily editorial line of The Sunday Times.

The public evidence establishes a structural conflict-of-interest and perception risk.

It does not automatically establish direct command over individual articles.

Indeed, the paper’s history of reporting on corruption and military procurement, and its repeated confrontations with different governments, demonstrates that its editorial behavior cannot credibly be reduced to that of a simple party mouthpiece.

The more accurate interpretation is:

the Wijewardene family is embedded in Sri Lanka’s political-social elite, while professional journalists inside The Sunday Times have repeatedly tried to preserve a space for editorial independence within that ownership structure.

Both propositions can be true simultaneously.

20. Why the family has retained such influence: the central achievement is not one charismatic founder but successful intergenerational replication of institutions.

The first generation, D. R., created a system in which:

commercial capital → newspaper group → political agenda-setting.

After Lake House was taken over by the state, the second generation, Ranjit, rebuilt:

private family capital → WNL → multilingual media portfolio → national distribution and advertising network.

The third generation has shown a degree of functional specialization:

Sujan Wijewardene has been more deeply involved in corporate management;

Ruwan Wijewardene entered politics. Media Ownership Monitor treats this coexistence of corporate and political roles as important to understanding the family’s network.

Unlike family businesses that disappear soon after the death of their founder, the Wijewardenes converted personal capability into assets that could be inherited:

brands;

shares;

printing and distribution systems;

journalistic networks;

political and business relationships;

educational capital;

institutional reputation.

That is why losing control of the core first-generation asset, Lake House, in 1973 did not permanently remove the family from the media sector.

It retained enough capital, knowledge and networks to create WNL.

That is arguably the family’s most significant business achievement.

21. Present position: The Sunday Times remains active, while WNL continues to display strong family control.

As of August 2026, The Sunday Times Sri Lanka’s official website remains actively updated, carrying news, editorials, Political Commentary, Business Times, sport, Sunday Times 2, education, magazine material and an e-paper offering. It has therefore evolved from a once-a-week print newspaper into an ongoing digital-news operation built around a Sunday print identity.

Current WNL corporate information continues to identify Ranjit Wijewardene as Chairman and Sujan Wijewardene as Deputy Chairman, with the company active across Sinhala-, English- and Tamil-language media.

Born in June 1937, Ranjit is 89 in 2026. WNL is consequently in a particularly important intergenerational phase.

Public sources confirm Sujan’s long-standing role in senior management, but the eventual detailed allocation of family control:

public information is limited / presently cannot be confirmed.

What is already clear is that Ranjit accomplished the central strategic task of his generation.

He did not recover his father’s Lake House.

Instead, he created a second privately controlled media system capable of competing with Lake House and serving multiple language markets.

22. If the commercial and influence value of The Sunday Times are separated, its competitive moat has at least six layers.

The first is brand history. It draws on the name and legacy of the old Times Group while the modern product itself was rebuilt by WNL in 1987.

The second is shared group infrastructure. The Sunday Times does not need to bear the entire cost of printing, distribution, sales and back-office functions independently; it can share systems with Lankadeepa and other WNL properties. This was part of Ranjit’s original economic rationale for launching the paper.

The third is national physical distribution. WNL developed a network numbering thousands of dealer outlets, an infrastructure that a pure digital startup would find difficult to reproduce.

The fourth is multilingual advertising bundling. A single advertiser can use the group to reach both the Sinhala mass market and influential English-speaking consumers.

The fifth is journalistic talent and archives. Decades of political reporting, investigative journalism, columnists and historical archives create institutional memory that cannot be replicated quickly.

The sixth is elite influence. Because it is English-language media, its absolute audience may be smaller than major Sinhala titles, but it is especially well positioned among senior corporate executives, lawyers, diplomats, academics, international institutions and policy communities.

Within WNL it is therefore best understood as:

a high-influence English flagship + a political-investigative platform + an entry point to premium advertising audiences

rather than merely “a newspaper that sells copies on Sunday.”

English Timeline and Core Assessment

23. Key chronology.

1886: D. R. Wijewardene is born.

Early 1900s: He studies at S. Thomas’ and Peterhouse, Cambridge, receives legal training and is exposed in Britain to Indian nationalist politics.

1912: D. R. returns to Ceylon, briefly practices law and increasingly engages in constitutional and political organization.

1914: He acquires the financially troubled Dinamina.

1918: He develops the Ceylon Daily News.

1926: Associated Newspapers of Ceylon Limited / Lake House is formally established.

1929: Publishing operations move into the new Lake House headquarters.

1937: Ranjit Sujiva Wijewardene is born.

1950: D. R. dies.

1956: Ranjit matriculates at Peterhouse, Cambridge.

1962: Ranjit takes command of ANCL/Lake House.

July 20, 1973: The ANCL Special Provisions Law comes into force; at least 75 percent of the company is vested in the Public Trustee on behalf of the government, ending effective Wijewardene family control of Lake House.

1979: Ranjit establishes Wijeya Publications/Wijeya Newspapers.

Mid-1980s: Rights associated with publications of the liquidating Times Group are acquired, providing legacy names and intellectual-property assets for WNL’s expansion.

1986: WNL launches Irida Lankadeepa. In October, Vijitha Yapa accepts the role of founder editor of The Sunday Times; recruitment begins in November.

June 7, 1987: The modern The Sunday Times is launched.

1991: The daily Lankadeepa is launched.

1990s: The Sunday Times enters an especially confrontational period of political journalism. Founder editor Yapa resigns amid an owner-intervention controversy, and Sinha Ratnatunga takes over.

1997: Ratnatunga is convicted of criminal defamation in a case involving reporting about President Kumaratunga; the case becomes a major press-freedom controversy.

1998: Armed men enter the home of Sunday Times defence correspondent Iqbal Athas.

1999: Daily Mirror emerges as a major WNL English daily brand.

2002: Two Air Force officers involved in the Athas raid receive nine-year prison sentences.

2007: Athas faces renewed serious threats after investigating the MiG-27 procurement transaction.

2017–2018: Media Ownership Monitor data show that newspapers controlled by the Wijewardene family collectively reached close to half of Sri Lanka’s print readership, making WNL one of the dominant forces in private print media. These are historical figures and should not be presented as 2026 market shares.

2018: Ranjit gives WAN-IFRA a detailed account of WNL’s strategy in digital media, video, native advertising, e-papers and integrated cross-platform advertising.

2026: The Sunday Times remains actively published and digitally updated; current WNL information continues to list Ranjit as Chairman and Sujan as Deputy Chairman.

24. Final assessment: the central story is not that one founder created one successful newspaper. It is that one family built a major media system twice.

The first construction was carried out by D. R. Wijewardene. During the colonial period, he converted family commercial wealth into newspaper capital, built Lake House into a multilingual national publishing infrastructure and used its newspapers to participate in the formation of Ceylonese nationalist and independence-era public opinion.

The second construction was carried out by Ranjit Wijewardene. After effectively losing the family’s core media property in 1973, he refused to define his future around recovering Lake House. In 1979 he began again, turning inherited industry knowledge into Wijeya Newspapers and assembling a portfolio through the sequence Irida Lankadeepa → The Sunday Times → Lankadeepa → Daily Mirror → financial/lifestyle/digital platforms.

The special value of The Sunday Times within that system is its combination of family capital, influential English-language readership, investigative journalism, political commentary, premium advertising audiences and international visibility.

Ranjit’s greatest success was not the invention of a radically new medium.

It was an understanding of three exceptionally durable forms of media capital:

a legacy brand can be reactivated; a distribution system can be reused at scale; journalistic credibility can accumulate over decades into an asset.

The family structure also creates clear governance concerns:

highly concentrated ownership, overlap between media proprietors and political-family networks, and the possibility of conflict between owner interests and editorial independence. RSF and Verité therefore placed the Wijewardene family near the center of their analysis of media concentration and political affiliation in Sri Lanka.

Yet the investigative history of The Sunday Times demonstrates that political family connections have not simply eliminated professional journalism within the organization. Reporters such as Iqbal Athas took extraordinary personal risks while investigating governments and the military.

The most accurate description of the Wijewardenes, therefore, is not merely “a wealthy family that owns newspapers.”

They are:

a Sri Lankan elite family that converted traditional commercial wealth, colonial elite education, nationalist politics, marriage networks, printing industry infrastructure, newspaper brands and modern digital media into a system of media power that survived the loss of its original flagship enterprise and was successfully reproduced across generations.

Within that century-long structure, The Sunday Times Sri Lanka is one of the family’s most internationally legible and politically influential media assets—and one of the clearest examples of the permanent tension between concentrated family ownership and professional journalism.