Staff Reporter :
Former Basic Bank Chairman Sheikh Abdul Hye Bacchu fell sick on the second day of his quizzing by the Anti-Corruption Commission (ACC) over a Tk 4,500 crore loan scam in the bank.
Nine ACC officials, who are probing 56 scam cases of the bank, interrogated him for over six hours at the Commission’s Segunbagicha headquarters in Dhaka on Wednesday.
On Monday, Bacchu for the first time faced grilling by ACC men over the sensational loan scams.
He was being quizzed by an ACC team since 10:00am, said ACC’s Public Relations Officer Pranab Kumar Bhattachariya.
Doctors examined Bacchu when he fell sick around 2:00pm, the ACC officer told The New Nation in the afternoon.
He came out of the ACC office around 5:00pm. ACC directors AKM Zayed Hossain Khan and Syed Iqbal Hossain, who are supervising the investigation, declined to make any comment on the second day’s interrogation as the matter was still under investigation.
The ACC has so far grilled 10 people, including nine former directors of the state-run bank, on the loan scam.
The ACC on November 23 summoned Bacchu and 10 former directors of the bank to its office for interrogation in the scam cases. The move came over two years after the graft watchdog filed 56 cases against the bankers over the loan scam that took place in the state-run bank between 2010 and 2013.
ACC was compelled to take the steps after several observations made by the Appellate Division and the High Court Division. Earlier on August 18, a three-member Supreme Court bench while holding hearing in two loan scam cases expressed discontent at the ACC for not naming Bacchu and the bank’s ex-board members.
“We don’t want the Anti-Corruption Commission to maintain any ‘pick and choose’ policy in implicating accused in such cases, as nobody is above the law. All the allegations must be investigated with importance,” said the court.
Eleven members of the board of directors including Abul Hye Bacchu were summoned in phases. On 18 November, ACC sent the notice to his house at DOHS, Banani, to appear on 4 December.
In between April 2012 and March 2013, the board of directors led by Abdul Hye Bacchu disbursed Tk 4,500 crore as loans through unprecedented irregularities.
After investigations, Bangladesh Bank at that time said, “Such decisions by the board of directors are not practised in any of the 40 scheduled banks. The possibility of recovery of this loan is very thin.”
At the end of 2015, ACC filed 56 cases with Motijheel, Paltan and Gulshan police stations in connection with the BASIC bank loan scam, accusing 156 persons. However, Bacchu was not accused in any of the cases.
