Shawdesh Desk:

Major recommendations by a Jatiya Sangsad watchdog have remained unimplemented for a decade, exposing the lack of commitment of the government and its agencies concerned to checking ‘unbridled corruption’ in the financial sector.

The recommendations of the parliamentary standing committee on finance ministry include recovering the embezzled fund of about Tk 3,500 crore by the little known Hallmark Group from the country’s largest state-owned bank, Sonali Bank, detected by the Bangladesh Bank in 2012.

The money is yet to be recovered.

Discussions on how to recover the misappropriated fund from the Hallmark Group and on how to take to task those responsible for the worst-ever share market collapse in 2010-11 frequently featured in the JS body meetings chaired by the then committee chairman AHM Mustafa Kamal from 2009 to 2013.

Mustafa Kamal has been serving as the finance minister since January this year but Sonali Bank is yet to recover a single penny of the misappropriated loan it provided to the Hallmark Group in violation of rules and regulations.

He told New Age on Wednesday after a meeting of the cabinet committee on national procurement at the secretariat that he still stood his ground.

‘We have to recover that money,’ he said indicating the money stolen from the banks.

He observed that the exit plan the government had introduced for restructuring bad loans created a scope for recovering the bad loans from many errant borrowers.

Bringing to book scam masterminds like former BASIC Bank chairman Sheikh Abdul Hye Bachchu for providing over Tk 6,000 crore shady loans to fictitious borrowers between 2009 and 2014 was another major recommendation made by the JS body.

The unprecedented loan scam threw the once profitable state-owned bank into almost bankruptcy with the percentage of the bank’s bad loans remaining unchanged at 58 per cent for the last five years.

The immediate past chairman of the parliamentary standing committee on finance ministry, Mohammad Abdur Razzaque, now agricultural minister, said that it was difficult for the standing committee to make government agencies accountable without strong political commitment.

Talking to New Age on July 23, he said that they had put forward a lot of recommendations, but the pressing ones still remained unimplemented.

The JS body was also vocal against the high growth of defaulted loans and wanted effective measures to recover such loans from the wilful defaulters since the bad loan culture was described by the economists as the most critical problem for the country’s ailing financial sector.

Razzaque has emphasised that there should be a mechanism by which the  standing committee can make ministries and other government bodies accountable.

He lamented that the recommendations made by the JS standing committees were ‘not binding’.

Razzaque, who led the parliamentary standing committee on finance ministry from 2014 to 2018, placed a series of recommendations including steps to ensure punishment for the culprits involved in the Hallmark and BASIC Bank scams.

‘The culprits of the Hallmark and BASIC Bank scams have been moving around freely. The committee recommended immediate action against them,’ Razzaque told reporters after a meeting on March 10, 2015.

About 10 months later the same committee at a meeting on January 28, 2016 criticised the Anti-Corruption Commission for failing to expose the corruption committed by former BASIC Bank chairman Sheikh Abdul Hye Bachchu.

Transparency International Bangladesh executive director Iftekharuzzaman found lack of will as well as capacity of the government and relevant institutions like ACC to implement the recommendations of the committee.

He also regretted that the collective clout of those responsible for the cancerous corruption in the financial sector was becoming most dominant in the state’s power structure.

‘As a result, the abuse of financially-sourced political and bureaucratic power continues to protect and promote impunity of the key actors in the scams,’ he said.

On June 30, 2015, former finance minister AMA Muhith told the Jatiya Sangsad that action could not be taken against Bachchu because of ruling Awami League leaders.

Former BB deputy governor Ibrahim Khaled criticised the parliamentary standing committee on finance ministry saying that they could not make any effective contribution in shaping pro-people policies and laws.

He further resented that the JS body endorsed a controversial bill in November 2017 prescribing amendments to the Bank Company Act 1991, which created scopes for wider family control over private commercial banks.

The clearance from the JS body enabled the private bank owners to fulfil their long-standing demand for doubling the number of family members to four in a bank’s board of directors and extending the tenure of directors to three consecutive terms from the previous two.