A NATIONAL daily reported on Friday that in the back-drop of capital flight from Bangladesh in recent years, the Customs Intelligence, an auxiliary of National Board of Revenue (NBR), has filed a money laundering case against the owner of a garments factory on allegations of siphoning off about Tk 100 crore from the country. It is the first such case filed by NBR after the government empowered the Revenue Authority to investigate money laundering and it is a good initiative to combat the crime. Usually, businesspeople siphon money through under invoicing of Letter of Credit (LC) and other illegal channels when political turmoil, economic impasse and stagnation grips the country. In that context capital flight is obvious. Meanwhile, the Global Financial Integrity (GFI) report stated that Bangladesh lost $9.66 billion through capital flight in 2013. As many companies are in the dock for money laundering, the NBR intelligence should extend investigations aiming at combating capital flight.The report said between 2010 and 2105 the apparel company shipped 297 apparel consignments abroad but did not bring back any proceeds from the exports. The intelligence found that there was an attempt to ship the containers through forged bank documents and letters of credit. By using forged bank documents, the company shipped the containers in the last five years. Apparels were shipped to countries such as the Philippines and the United Arab Emirates and the payment remained abroad. Such misconduct is not new and the firm is not the only one such company, hundreds of such firms are involved in capital flight. The government should be strict and nab them. As per GFI report, on average $5.59 billion was siphoned out of Bangladesh a year between 2004 and 2013. This high amount of illegal capital outflow puts Bangladesh at 26th position among 149 countries in the latest GFI ranking of economies exporting illegal capital. Trade misinvoicing is defined as a method for moving money illegally across the borders that involves deliberately misreporting the value of a commercial transaction on an invoice submitted to Customs. To put matters into perspective, that figure is three times the amount of foreign direct investment (FDI) Bangladesh received in the last couple of years.Money laundering goes on freely following many ways. The cases are filed against exporters after the money has gone out of the country. But in our view the exporters are the small operators of money laundering. Big ones do not have to go through banks, even if they do, no cases are launched against them. Cases are also seen as a way of making money by others through corruption. The country is facing a flood of corruption denting the economy deeply. Hollowness of the economy will be exposed.
