Staff Reporter :
The Anti-Corruption Commission (ACC) said that no specific allegations were found against former BASIC Bank chairman Sheikh Abdul Hye Bachchu in the loan scam during his four-year tenure.
“We don’t want to submit any half-done charge sheet. No specific allegations were found against Bachchu in the loan scam,” ACC Secretary Mohammad Delwar Bakht told the media on Tuesday.
He added that since the allegations against Bachchu were not proven, the commission didn’t order a charge sheet yet.
In 2009, the government appointed Hye as chairman and Kazi Fakhrul Islam as the managing director of the state-owned specialised bank. Scandal hit the bank hard when the central bank report revealed that about Tk 50 billion was swindled out of the bank through loan frauds during Bacchu’s four-year tenure.
The central bank served a show cause notice to BASIC’s top official Kazi Fakhrul in March of 2014 and issued a letter to the Finance Ministry to dissolve Basic Bank’s board of directors in April that year. Bacchu resigned from his post soon afterwards.
In July the same year, the Bangladesh Bank forwarded a detailed report to the ACC, where it said Bachchu’s involvement was found. BASIC Bank is accused of giving loans without collateral and using false documents and fictitious names and organisations in violation of the rules and regulations. The ACC opened investigations into the state-run bank after allegations surfaced that billions in loans were illegally released from the Gulshan, Dilkusha and Shantinagar branches between 2009 and 2012, when Bachchu was heading the bank.
The ACC has prosecuted 26 officers of the bank and 130 others in 56 cases in September 2015 on charges of helping several businesses to secure the loans through forgery.
Neither Bachchu nor any member of the bank’s board of directors was named in the cases.
