Tycoons close to Sheikh Hasina siphoned off $17b, S Alam alone laundered $10b, Ahsan H Mansur to FT

Business tycoons, close to the ousted government of Sheikh Hasina, in collusion with members of the Bangladesh’s military intelligence agency siphoned US $17 billion out of the banking sector during her rule, alleged Bangladesh Bank governor Ahsan H Mansur in an interview with globally renowned newspaper Financial Times.

The UK-based newspaper published the interview on Monday.

In the interview, Ahsan Mansur told the Financial Times that some former officials of the Directorate General of Forces Intelligence (DGFI) had helped force of leading banks.

The FT interview also said an estimated Tk 2 trillion ($16.7 billion) had been laundered from Bangladesh after taking over the banks. Methods such as loans made to their new shareholders and inflated import invoices were used for this purpose.

The central bank governor termed this to be “the biggest, highest robbing of banks by any international standards.”. “It didn’t happen on that scale anywhere, and it was state-sponsored and it couldn’t have happened without intelligence people putting guns [to former bank CEOs’] heads.”

Ahsan H Mansur said M Saiful Alam, founder and chair of S Alam Group, and his associates had “siphoned off” at least US $10 billion “as a minimum” from the banking system after taking control of banks with the help of the DGFI. “Every day they were granting loans to themselves,” he told the newspaper.

The US-based law firm Quinn Emanuel Urquhart & Sullivan on behalf of Saiful Alam issued a statement claiming that there was “no truth” to Ahsan H Mansur’s allegations.

“The coordinated campaign of the interim government against the S Alam Group and several other leading businesses in Bangladesh has failed to respect even basic principles of due process,” the statement read.

The Inter Services Public Relations Directorate, which handles media inquiries for Bangladesh’s armed forces, did not respond to a request of the Financial Times for comment.

The newspaper further said it could not reach the DGFI for comments on the allegations made in the interview.