The Bangladesh Atomic Energy Commission will examine the genuineness of a ton of reserve bullion at the Bangladesh Bank's vault to put at rest the controversy that the gold has been adulterated.
Representatives from the Customs intelligence and Bangladesh Bank will be present during the testing of the precious metal at the BAEC, BB source said.
A reputed goldsmith and Customs intelligence officers jointly weighed and examined the reserved gold and detected impurity in it. The 22-carat gold was found to be of 18-carat after the central bank received gold bars and gold chains over a period of time, investigators believe.
Amid allegations of irregularities surrounding the gold deposited by the Customs in the central bank's vault, the State Minister for Finance MA Mannan has said the government will look into the matter.
The CIID found the anomalies while inspecting randomly sampled gold from 963kg deposit in the central bank's vault from January to April last year, a Bangla daily reported on Tuesday.
CIID kept gold bars and chains weighing 3.3kg in the vault on August 23 of 2015, but during the inspection it detected adulteration in the gold, which caused the state a loss of over Tk 11.1 million, according to the daily.
The state suffered another loss of over Tk 19 million by showing 22 carat gold instead of 18 carat, the report claims.
CIID agents often seize large consignments of smuggled gold at airports and hand these to the Bangladesh Bank.
The Customs Intelligence and Investigation Directorate of the National Board of Revenue dug out serious discrepancies in gold management, as the investigators examined 963kg of gold out of a huge quantity kept at the central bank's vault, on the basis of random sampling.
The directorate, which prepared a report based on inspection at the vault in January-April 2017 and submitted it in January 2018, sent a letter to the Bangladesh Bank seeking necessary action.
According to the report, on 23 August 2015, warehouse official of the Customs Harunur Rashid handed over a gold bar and a chain weighing 3.3 kg to the central bank authorities.
The Bangladesh Bank authorities, after examination of the gold by a goldsmith, certified it as 19.2-carat genuine gold before putting it into its vault. That means the metal contained 80 per cent pure gold.
When the team of investigators reexamined the gold bars in January this year, it was found that the metal contained only 46.66 per cent gold and it was graded as 11.2-carat gold, said the report. The chains had 15.12 per cent gold which is graded as 3.63-carat gold.
"The disc and ring contain no gold at all. These are made with alloy of other metals," read the report. The government has lost Tk 11.8 million as a result of this adulteration alone.
Carat is a measurement of purity of gold alloyed with other metals. Lower carats contain less gold.
