POWERFUL business tycoons, who had been close to the deposed prime minister Sheikh Hasina, have swindled $17 billion off the banking sector, as the Bangladesh Bank government has said in an interview with the Financial Times, during the 15 years of the authoritarian regime of the Awami League. The central banker is reported to have said that the tycoons worked with the military intelligence agency in this. He has also alleged in the interview that the agency facilitated the takeover of major banks which led to the systematic transfer of the money out of Bangladesh. This is said to be the biggest robbing of banks by any international standards that would not be possible without intelligence officials pressuring the chiefs of the banks into compliance. The money was swindled out in loans given out to new shareholders and inflated import invoices while the government during the 15 years pursued a development model frenziedly obsessed with growth in gross domestic product and per capita income that have hardly benefitted people at large. What is further disparaging is that the S Alam Group alone is involved in the laundering of at least $10 billion. All this is but a fraction of the whole illicit capital flow.
The central bank governor has said that intelligence officials forced members on bank boards to sell their shares at gunpoint to the S Alam Group chief, with one bank after another facing coercive takeover. All this cannot have happened without the involvement of ranking government leaders. Most of the activities of the group was suspicious and questionable. Yet, nothing could then be done to stop such happenings. This suggests the intensity of the influence that the S Alam Group enjoyed on the government. And, all such incidents left the economy high and dry. The interim government, installed on August 8 after the deposed prime minister had fled to India on August 5, has the repatriation of the money thus laundered high on its agenda. The government has now sought international assistance to investigate overseas assets of Sheikh Hasina鈥檚 associates. It has, therefore, become imperative that the government should go all out to repatriate the money that has been laundered in all such cases and hold to justice all the offenders. The government should also hold to justice all the people and quarters involved in the offences. The government should arrest chiefs of all the banks and the people and quarters concerned in the Bangladesh Bank, which is the regulator of the banking sector, and interrogate them to get a clear picture of how the offences have happened for an insight into ways to stop their recurrence and bring to justice others who were also involved.
The interim government should, therefore, recover the stolen funds that have left dozens of bank mostly bankrupt and the economy dry. It should also hold to justice people in the nexus, still at large on both the private and the public side, to stop the recurrence of such scams.