Staff Reporter :
The authorities of Bangladesh Small Industries and Commerce (BASIC) Bank on Wednesday removed four of its top officials on charges of loan irregularities and misuse of the bank’s fund.
Of them, three are Deputy Managing Directors (DMDs) and another is a General Manager (GM).
The DMDs are Fazlus Sobhan, Mohammad Selim and Ruhul Alam and the GM is Mahbubul Alam.
The dismissal letters were signed by Bank’s Managing Director Khondoker Md Iqbal, official sources said. On Tuesday, the board of directors of the state-owned bank in a meeting approved their dismissal orders as an internal probe of the bank found them guilty in loan irregularities and misuse funds. Prior to this, the authorities of scam-hit Bank terminated two of its officials on charges of loan irregularities. The officials were Deputy General Manager Shipar Ahmed and Deputy Manager Zahid Hasan.
They were removed for sanctioning loans of thousands of crores taka without proper scrutiny, security and collateral when they were serving the bank’s Gulshan branch in the capital. Earlier, a Bangladesh Bank (BB) inspection found several incidents of loan scams in four BASIC Bank branches (Motijheel, Shantinagar, Dilkusha and Gulshan), involving nearly Tk 4,425 crore between December 2009 and November 2012.
The loans were given mostly to fake or nonexistence companies with the nexus of the errant bank officials prior approval by the then board of directors of the bank.
Following exposure of the loan scam, BB in May 2014, removed nine top BASIC Bank officials, including Managing Director Kazi Fakhrul Islam. The Anti-Corruption Commission (ACC) also filed 18 cases against 26 former and current officials of the bank linked with Tk 4,500 crore loan scams. ACC also named 76 other people in the cases.
