THE Anti-Corruption Commission (ACC) has dropped nine prime suspects from the chargesheets in three of the five cases filed in August 2013 on charge of money laundering through illegal Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) business raising questions about selective application of the rule of law by the anti-graft body. The question arises whether or not the ACC is protecting persons enjoying blessings of influential quarters and instead pushing some hapless people to face prosecution as part of a cover up for big cases of money laundering. The speculations run high in the backdrop of similar exonerations of high value suspects in other graft cases.
News reports in most national dailies on Thursday said the Commission on Tuesday had approved the chargesheets in two cases dropping the names of the former managing director of Bangladesh Telecommunications Company Ltd (BTCL), a former member (Maintenance and Operation) of the company, a former general manager and an assistant divisional engineer from the charges which implicated them in the first information report to police. In the same case the Commission had also relieved contract manager of Ericsson Bangladesh Ltd and another engineer who were named in the first information reports (FIR) along with the others for their role in illegal VoIP trafficking to cause a total loss of Tk 607 crore to the exchequer.
Earlier, the Commission had also mysteriously dropped the name of BTCL managing director and its member from another case. It dropped the names of the nine in the final chargesheets following the investigation reports submitted by a deputy director of the anti-graft body. He said in the report that their involvement in destroying international incoming phone calls from the Call Detail Records device were not proven in the final probe. The BTCL senior officials name in another case of embezzlement of Tk 3.27 crore were dropped three months ago. Reports said most money laundering took place by erasing incoming international call minutes from records at the city’s incoming call gate. These officials working together laundered or helped the laundering of Tk 10 crore daily on an average by allowing a mechanism to work to divert international calls to safe private channels away from government registers records. It caused the government a total loss of over Tk 1200 crore and the senior BTCL men instead of honestly discharging their responsibility had joined the syndicate.
As we see, the news of illegal VoIP business involving international incoming calls is almost regular headlines in the national dailies and the loss of the government revenue is enormous on a regular basis. We know criminal gangs are active in this business and they have their roots in powerful political quarters of the government. The dropping of the names of the senior BTCL men from the final chargesheet only reaffirm the public perception about it while people’s faith in the ACC is bound to suffer further dents from such incidents. We hold the view that the ACC must apply the rule of law without fear or favour. Otherwise it may become a lame duck organization in the eyes of the people.
