In a gross violation of its own rules, the central bank has allowed an alleged money launderer to reschedule defaulted loan of Tk 199 crore taken from Bangladesh Commerce Bank Ltd (BCBL) through forged documents.
Bangladesh Bank also gave the BCBL permission to waive interest to the tune of Tk 71 crore on the defaulted loan of SB Exim owned by the alleged money launderer, Shahjahan Bablu.
As per the BB rules, no bank is allowed to reschedule any defaulted loans that have been secured through forgery. In such a case, a bank must file a lawsuit with a court to recover the embezzled fund.
SB Exim swindled the private commercial lender out of the fund through fake export bills for terracotta tiles in 2018, according to probes carried out by several organisations, including Bangladesh Financial Intelligence Unit (BFIU), a government agency fighting money laundering and terror financing.
Though Bablu had not shipped any goods abroad, he sold the fake export bills to the bank. The lender later created a loan against the payments to the borrower as it didn’t receive the money from foreign banks.
Instead of going for legal action against the swindler, the BCBL in November last year rescheduled the defaulted loan and also waived interest on it, breaching the banking rules.
A central bank team later detected the anomaly during an inspection at the bank.
In December 2019, the BB took a tough stance against the…
