Finance Minister AMA Muhith has said Bangladesh would not share the findings of Bangladesh Bank’s cyber heist probe report with any one as it is an internal matter.
“The probe report cannot be shared with Philippines Rizal Commercial Bank Corporation (RCBC) or anyone because it is an internal matter of Bangladesh” Muhith said.
He made the statement while briefing to journalists after a meeting with Law Minister Anisul Haq at his secretariat office on Sunday.
Haq briefed the Finance Minister three days after he arrived to the country following a visit to Manila to speed up the process of retrieving the remaining $65 million of stolen $81 million from Bangladesh Bank (BB) account.
BB has already recovered $15.25 million from the Philippines’ anti-money laundering council, nine months after hackers stole the $81 million from its account.
“Even though media is reporting about the matter but we haven’t received an official request for sharing the probe report with RCBC or the authorities of Philippines,” said Muhith.
The Minister also expressed the hope to bring back the $29 million more heist fund which remains frozen in Philippine following a court directive.
“I don’t know how RCBC can consider the stolen money as its asset,” he commented. Earlier, Reuters reported Philippines government wants Bangladesh to share the findings of its investigation into the heist to help speed up recovery of the stolen funds.
RCBC’s external counsel Thea Daep last week urged BB to be transparent and produce the results of its own investigation to shed light on who was behind the heist, saying it was the least Bangladesh Bank could do.
Philippines anti-money laundering body last month filed charges against five RCBC officials in connection with the theft.
Law Minister last week said RCBC should shoulder the burden for accepting stolen funds. RCBC was fined a record one billion pesos ($20 million) by the Philippine central bank for its failure to prevent the movement of the stolen Bangladesh money through its bank.
Huq said paying that fine was tantamount to accepting culpability. Unknown cyber criminals tried to steal nearly $1billion from the Bangladesh Bank’s reserve account with the Federal Reserve Bank in New York in February.
They succeeded in transferring some $81million from the account and funneled into four accounts at the RCBC Jupiter branch in Manila. The funds were then transferred into casinos and junket operators through remittance firm PhilRem Service Corp. Following the incident, the government formed a high-powered committee to probe into the cyber heist.
The three-member probe panel, led by former BB governor Mohammed Farashuddin, earlier submitted the report to the Finance Minister AMA Muhith.
