Staff Reporter :
The Anti-Corruption Commission [ACC] on Monday arrested two senior officials of the Bangladesh Road Transport Authority [BRTA] and Rajdhani Unnayan Katripakkha [RAJUK] for their alleged involvement in large-scale financial corruption.
The arrested persons were identified as Abu Ashraf Siddique, Assistant Director of BRTA and S M Shafiqur Rahman, Project Director [PD] of Rajdhani Unnayan Katripakkha [RAJUK].
They were arrested in separate cases from different areas.
Of them, Assistant Director of BRTA Abu Ashraf Siddique was arrested from Iquria office of Keraniganj in the outskirts of capital. He was accused in five cases in connection with fake registration of vehicles by submitting counterfeit documents.
For which, the government was deprived of getting around Taka 30 lakh revenue as tax.
“Yes, the ACC team has arrested the BRTA official,” Secretary of the ACC, Abu Md Mustafa Kamal, said yesterday.
Sources close to the ACC said, the coordinated district office of ACC on December 31, 2012 filed five cases against six persons, including Abu Ashraf Siddique of BRTA, for dodging taxes during vehicles’ registration.
Other accused in the cases are owners of some five trucks, namely Harun-ar-Rashid Bahadur, Nurul Islam, Fayez Ahmed, Shahjahan Khan and Nasir Uddin. The above truck owners gave false information to BRTA saying that they had deposited Taka 30, 14,380 at Sonali Bank as tax. Before giving false information, they had a deal with Abu Ashraf Siddique in this regard. Not only that, they also had submitted the relevant papers, including letter of credit [LC], shipping document and bill of entry, all were later proven as forged documents.
The matter was investigated by the Deputy Assistant Director of ACC [divisional office] Abdul Aziz. Later, the cases were transferred to ACC head office for proper investigation where Deputy Assistant Director Tajul Islam was assigned to reinvestigate the incident, the ACC sources said.
After completion of investigation, Tajul Islam submitted his report on three cases in June, 2014. Following the submission, the ACC authority asked him to submit charge-sheet over the three cases. Tajul Islam submitted investigation report on two other cases on July 3, 2014. Meanwhile, the prime accused in the cases Abu Ashraf Siddique of BRTA applied to the commission seeking self-defence, and following his appeal the commission heard his statement on July 22, 2014. In this situation, the ACC decided to conduct supplement investigation into the cases and assigned Deputy Director Farid Ahmed as an investigation officer. After completion of investigation, the IO Farid Ahmed recommended to file charge-sheet against the accused persons. Interestingly, the ACC high-ups did not accept his recommendations. And the ACC again assigned another Deputy Director Mirza Zahidul Alam as the investigating officer. In another incident, the ACC on Monday arrested S M Shafiqur Rahman, Project Director [PD] of RAJUK, in a cheque fraud case from Segunbagicha area in the capital.
Sources said that a businessman named Ferdous Kabir filed the case with Gulshan Police Station against Shafiqur on allegation of swindling Tk 4 lakh through cheque forgery.
Later, the case was transferred to ACC for investigation.
