ILLEGAL cross-border money transfers or suspicious transactions have been a concern for Bangladesh, which has taken new heights following the recent instability in the foreign exchange market and subsequent resource. The Bangladesh Financial Intelligent Unit received, according to a budget document, 12,046 suspicious transaction and suspicious activity reports in the first nine months of the outgoing financial year. In February, the Bangladesh Financial Intelligence Unit annual report said that it received a total of 14,106 reports, comprising 9,769 suspicious transactions and 4,337 suspicious activity reports in 2022鈥�23. In April, a World Bank report revealed that around $3.15 billion outflows from Bangladesh occur annually through illegal offshore accounts. The State of the Tax Justice Report 2020 estimated the offshore financial wealth of Bangladeshis at 0.7 per cent of the nation鈥檚 gross domestic product. The number of suspicious transactions related to bank loans increased more than fourfold in the past couple of years due to increasing loan scams 鈥� incidents of suspicious transactions related to bank loans shot up to 520 in 2022鈥�23, from 341 in 2021鈥�22 and 98 in 2020鈥�21. The intelligence unit believes that at least half of the suspicious transactions involve capital flights. The finance minister too has acknowledged that suspicious transactions have worryingly increased, but the steps they have taken are clearly ineffective.
In the outgoing financial year, the financial intelligence unit suspended 27,860 individual mobile financial service accounts, two MFS providers, blocked 291 websites, 33 apps and 464 social media platforms. While these steps are important in containing everyday online financial crimes such as online gambling and betting, gaming, cryptocurrency trading and hundi, they do not address the large-scale capital flight involving politically influential quarters. The report of the financial intelligence unit itself confirmed that money is syphoned off mostly through trade and over-invoicing methods and that it finds 20鈥�200 per cent over-invoicing in some cases. They routinely prepare reports on suspicious transactions and send them to the Criminal Investigation Department, the Anti-Corruption Commission, the National Board of Revenue and other agencies. There is reportedly a list of suspicious transactions with the names of the people involved in money laundering and financial scams, but the government has made little to no effort to bring the money launderers to justice or to bring the money back. The government appears more pro-active in concealing the information than in curbing money laundering and financial scams. It is assumed that this tendency exists because the names purportedly include influential politicians, public servants and businesspeople.
For the incumbent to make economic growth stable, it must abandon politically patronising the money launderers and urgently attend to the issue of illicit flow of capital by establishing an effective and foolproof mechanism to check the unabated practice of trade misinvoicing and other forms of illegal financial transactions. In addition to a judicious investigation into the allegation of money laundering, the government must immediately initiate a diplomatic procedure with 鈥榯ax heaven鈥� countries to recover the money that has already been syphoned out of the country.
