Bangladesh on track in asset recovery operation

By Rosemarie Zamora

Since Bangladesh ousted ex-Premier Sheikh Hasina in 2024 and assigned an interim government to manage the country, led by Nobel laureate Chief Adviser Professor Muhammad Yunus, it has been the administration’s goal to recover the looted assets, including companies and institutions, accumulated by Hasina and her family through embezzlement, money laundering, and abusing political influence.

$16 billion stolen yearly during Hasina’s rule

After Yunus was named chief adviser of the interim government, he immediately formed a committee on the economy to help manage the country after the crisis brought on by the uprising in July 2024.

Economist Debapriya Bhattacharya submitted a report in December 2024 to Yunus, claiming that an average of $16 billion may have been illicitly siphoned out of Bangladesh every year during Hasina’s 15-year rule.

The committee investigated seven large projects out of 29 which had more than BDT100 billion ($836 million) expenditure outlay each.

Although the seven projects had an initial cost of BDT1.14 billion, Hasina’s government allegedly revised the costs of the projects to BDT1.95 billion.

The report accused Hasina of adding more components and inflating land prices.

Central Bank governor Ahsan Mansur, who also worked at the International Monetary Fund (IMF) for 27 years, made an accusation against Hasina, saying that $17 billion was siphoned from the country’s financial system during her rule.

Some experts, however, allege that the true value looted by Hasina could exceed $30 billion.

According to Mansur, Hasina and other political leaders were able to take control of the central banks and other private banks.

Mansur said the banks issued billions of dollars in loans to companies, some of them fictional, that were never paid back.

“Much of that money was then transferred out of the country illegally,” he says before describing the move as “systematic robbing of the banks”.

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What can the interim government do to recover the looted assets?

In March this year, the interim government announced that it would enact a special law to fast-track the recovery process of money laundered during Hasina’s rule.

Yunus called for expediting efforts to bring back billions in stolen money, adding it is the government’s priority to immediately recover the laundered money both from the banking system and by other means.

In addition, the Bangladesh Bank has set up 11 specialist teams to track the assets of 11 powerful families accused of laundering billions of dollars to the United Kingdom, the United Arab Emirates, the United States, Malaysia, and Singapore over the past decade.

The government is also working with international partners through mutual legal assistance treaties to help in recovering the assets laundered abroad.

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Latest development

As part of the Bangladesh Bank’s asset recovery operation, it recently seized BDT1,75,625 crore worth of foreign and domestic assets linked to 10 influential business groups and the family of Hasina.

According to the chief adviser’s press secretary Shafiqul Alam, the value of the attached immovable domestic assets stood at BDT1,30,758 crore, while the foreign attachments totalled $164 million.

The frozen domestic movable assets amounted to BDT42,614.27 crore and the foreign movable assets amounted to $20.78 million.

The government said the recovered funds will be used for poverty alleviation and public welfare.

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