Interim government's recent move to bring back laundered money is commendable in the face of country's fragile economic situation, depleting forex reserves and severe dollar crisis.
Commerce Adviser Saleh Uddin Ahmed has already announced plans to form a special taskforce to recover siphoned off money abroad with the help from different agencies from both home and abroad.
Accordingly, a joint taskforce to work on preventing money laundering will also be established between our Anti-Corruption Commission and the US Federal Bureau of Investigation. This was decided in a meeting on Monday in Dhaka between ACC and an FBI delegation.
Government's all out efforts to bring back stolen money have been taken in the wake of an eye watering amount of money being laundered every year from Bangladesh to a good number of foreign countries mainly by a group of dishonest politicians, businesspeople and high-ranking government officials.
As per a recent report from the Washington-based Global Financial Integrity, an average of around Tk 80,000 crore has been smuggled abroad from Bangladesh every year. This is quite visible when properties owned by Bangladeshis have been reported in some countries like UAE, Malaysia, Singapore, Canada, USA and UK in recent times.
Now the question is why money laundering from Bangladesh is taking place very easily and rampantly. The cogent reason is it is easy to make and hide money in our country under political influence and under the very nose of the government officials particularly those who are charged with preventing money laundering.
There are various ways and methods of laundering money. But the most common method is through over-invoicing and under-invoicing. It is clear when trade-based money laundering investigators often find huge discrepancies between declared and actual imported goods.
This kind of money laundering occurs every now and then as concerned officials often face challenges in verifying foreign exporters' information. In this case, Bangladeshi embassies in relevant countries could provide information about the exporters.
Another way of money laundering is under the guise of paying excessively for the children's education abroad by a section of government officials and businesspeople. Actually, this money is spent on buying houses and properties.
Who are money launderers and whence does this money come? Willful bank loan defaulters, corrupt government officials and politicians are the major people who stashed their ill-gotten money overseas.
This is often said that loan defaulters are mostly money launderers in our country. This is why defaulted bank loans soared to an all-time high of Tk2.11 lakh crore at the end of last June, representing over 11 percent of the total disbursed loans.
But experts have been in view that the actual amount of defaulted loans in banks is far higher than what is reported by the concerned government and private commercial banks which are said to have concealed information about defaulted loans in many cases.
We are hopeful that government's efforts to bring back laundered money will turn out to be a successful drive.
