Kazi Zahidul Hasan :
Bangladesh Bank (BB) is yet to make any headway in collecting detailed information about the secret accounts held by Bangladeshi citizens in various Swiss banks due to poor response from the concerned bank authorities.
Earlier, BB wrote several letters to the Swiss National Bank (SNB) to gather such information. But, the later did not respond in this regard.
In the face of failure to get any response from SNB authorities, BB is again contemplating to write to the Swiss Bank authorities requesting them to furnish details of reported Bangladeshi accounts holders who are believed to Swiss Banks country and deposited those with various Swiss banks, officials said. They said, the concerned department of BB has already prepared a draft of the letter which is expected to be sent to the SNB authorities next week.
“We have already sent several letters to the concerned Swiss authorities seeking detailed information about accounts held by Bangladeshi citizens in various Swiss banks. But, we are yet to get any reply from them,” BB spokesperson M Mahfuzur Rahman told The New Nation on Tuesday.
Apart from this, the Bangladesh Financial Intelligence Unit (BFIU) also approached the Money Laundering Reporting Office (MLRO) of Switzerland for signing a deal with it for sharing information on money laundering.
“Such a deal is necessary to get access to information on the secret accounts of Bangladeshi citizens in general. But, it (MLRO) is also yet to make a positive response in this regard turning the BB’s move unsuccessful,” he added.
Rahman also mentioned that the Swiss government has been maintaining a secret policy regarding the foreign nationals’ bank accounts held in Swiss banks. It had also legal barriers in sharing such information to world governments. And that is why the MLRO of Switzerland is hesitating to ink such a deal with us, he said.
“Still we’re perusing the matter with Swiss authorities. Besides, discussion is also going on with the concerned Swiss officials in various international forums. We hope we will be able to strike a deal in this regard with them soon,” he noted.
The BB spokesperson also said Bangladesh and Switzerland are members of the Egmont Group of Financial Intelligence Units. So, they can provide us data of Bangladeshi depositors for intelligence reasons. If we get the information, we cannot publish names of the depositors as per their rules.
Switzerland has traditionally been the oldest, the most formidable and the most popular secret banking jurisdiction, attracting massive sums of tax-evaded money from across the world into its banks with numbered accounts.
According to the SNB report, in 2014, an amount of money deposited with different Swiss banks by Bangladeshi citizens was Tk 4,300 crore which a year earlier was Tk 3,150 crore. It was Tk. 1,991 crore in 2012.
