Staff Reporter :
Petrobangla on Tuesday formed a technical committee to evaluate the system losses into the disappearance of 1.45 lakh tonnes of coal from the stockyard of Barapukuria Coal Mining Company Ltd (BCMCL) in Parbatipur upazila of Dinajpur.
The committee was formed a day after former BCMCL managing director Habib Uddin Ahmed on Wednesday told reporters that the disappearance of coal was nothing but a system loss which was never estimated since BCMCL’s commercial production of coal started in 2005.
He said this after emerging from an interrogation at the office of Anti-Corruption Commission (ACC) at Segunbagicha in the city.
Earlier on in July, Abul Monsur Faizullah, chairman of Petrobangla, hinted on forming a technical committee to evaluate the technical aspects of the coal-mine. Petrobangla later formed the committee on August 28.
Mahbub Sarwar, director (Production Sharing Contract) of Petrobangla, is leading the seven-member body.
Other members are: Professor Chowdhury Kamruzzaman of Dhaka University’s Geology department; Professor Dr Md Shafiqul Islam of Petroleum and Mining Engineering department of Shahjalal University of Science and Technology; Mokbul-e-Elahi, former director (Mine and Minerology and Planning) of Petrobangla; AKM Shamsuddin, former managing director of Paschimanchal Gas Company Ltd (PGCL) in Sirajganj; Md Akbar Ali, director (Geology) of Geological Survey of Bangladesh; and SM Habibur Rahman, general manager (Engineering) of Petrobangla.
The committee has been asked to submit its findings to chairman of Petrobangla within 10 working days.
In a letter signed by Mostafa Kamal, director (Admin) of Petrobangla, it was stated that the technical committee would be checking for any system loss between productions to marketing of BCMCL.
The committee will also determine the percentage of system loss if it exists, and will provide feedbacks and suggestions in this regard.
The BCMCL officials claimed that the disappearance of coal was due to a system loss of 1.4 percent of the total production since 2005. According to the officials, the company, since 2005, produced 1.0166 crore tonnes of coal until June 29 this year. Of the coal produced, 66.87 lakh tonnes had been supplied to Bangladesh Power Development Board and 33.19 lakh tonnes of coal was sold to different industries and brickfield operators, while 12,000 tonnes of coal was internally used.
Around 1.48 lakh tonnes of coal should be at the BCMCL stockyard. But, the ACC team, Petrobangla officials and visiting members of BPDB found only around 3,000 tonnes of coal at the stockyard.
The market price of the disappeared coal was around Tk 230 crore.
