IRREGULARITIES and corruption have gripped cooperative societies in the absence of effective regulations and supervision by the concerned government agencies according to reports released by Transparency International Bangladesh (TIB) on Tuesday. It said operators of many cooperative societies are taking away billions of taka from members of the public and the figure compiled for just one year in 2013 alone stands at Tk 90 billion. The TIB report identified a rather unnoticed area of embezzlement of depositors money so far while banks, non-bank financial institutions and the stock market were on public focus due to the high profile loan scams which rendered them almost crippled in the past several years. TIB functionaries carried a research on cooperative finance titled ‘Cooperative Management: Challenges of Good Governance and Ways to Overcome’ and divulged the terrible information that such so-called societies mainly focused on swindling citizens of their money under the guise of being a respectable institution. The money at stake involved some 21 multiple cooperatives and lending associations in which 9 lakhs investors put their money. The country has 186,199 cooperatives having around 9.4 million members and about 47 per cent of them are inactive while others are active and the safety of depositors funds with the active ones are largely unclear as the TIB report suggests. The report further said a cooperative society at upazila and district levels illegally pays Tk 8,000 to Tk 10,000 to get itself registered. The amount could go up to Tk 80,000 in terms of working areas. Moreover the registered societies, on an average, pay kickbacks of Tk 2,000 to do nominal annual auditing at upazila level, Tk 20,000 at divisional level and nearly Tk 30,000 at metropolitan level. They maintain two sets of account books-one for auditors and the other for direct stakeholders. An inspector unethically takes Tk 1,000 at district level and Tk 3,000 at metropolitan areas to pass the audit report and this is how the swindling of huge cooperative funds by dishonest sponsors and directors is going on almost unnoticed making the poor depositors paupers. As we see the TIB report has come as an eye opener to the public while the stakeholders know of their perils but since they come from the poor strata of the society, they remain silent on the false guarantee that they will receive the money. We are bewildered by the fact that loan scams and financial scandals are destroying almost every public bank, some private banks and such other non-banking institutions. It is not a secret any more but since powerful lobbies and influential persons are involved in the matters things are passing out without proper probes being conducted while punishing the culprits remain unheard of. Political persons involved in the big loan scams of Hallmark or Bismillah Group are out of sight while some poor bank officials have been charged. We hold the view that things can’t go unchallenged this way to preserve the foundation of the financial sector and the economy as a whole. We ask the government and the law enforcing agencies to act quickly to save deposits of the poor people in cooperative societies and stop the swindling of their funds by the powerful people who are running them behind the scenes.
