Bangladesh Muktijoddha Kalyan Trust is now set to sell all its industrial and commercial establishments, including real estates, incurring continuous loss and eventually facing closure for alleged corruption and inefficiency. The trust, created in 1972 for the welfare of wounded freedom fighters and family members of martyred freedom fighters, will now deposit the money earned from property sales in banks and run its activities with the interest income, says a media report. The report published in a national daily on Saturday said, the Ministry of Liberation War Affairs has sent the updated information on 32 industrial and commercial enterprises of the trust to the Ministry of Finance after determining the possible market prices of the trust properties. As per the current market value, the trust has a total wealth worth about Tk 5,622 crore. The Finance Ministry has agreed to the proposal of selling the properties of the trust, the report said. The trust was in1972 handed over 18 running and profitable industrial and commercial enterprises in Dhaka and Chattogram. After five years, another 11 industrial enterprises were handed over to it by the industries ministry.
Currently, all the establishments under the trust are closed except the Purnima Filling and Service Station on the Toyenbee Circular Road in the capital, which earns Tk 6 lakh per month. From the beginning, the trust ventured into various promising enterprises from manufacturing medicines, beverage, edible oil, chocolates, chemicals, glass and aluminium, rubber to running cinemas, restaurants and petrol filling stations. However, corruption and mismanagement have foiled all the efforts and made the trust a losing organisation, alleged insiders. Many dispossessed properties of the trust could not be recovered due to the involvement of dishonest officials, it is alleged.
We want to say the government must institute an investigation to find the people responsible for the sad plight of the Muktijoddha Kalyan Trust and hold them to account. It should also work out a plan to see if the industries now closed could be revived and be run in a profitable way, even if the trust needs to be overhauled.
