DHAKA — Outstanding bills owed by Bangladesh’s public and private power plants have reached 52,300 crore taka 88 lakh (about $4.4 billion), Power, Energy and Mineral Resources Minister Iqbal Hasan Mahmud told parliament Sunday.
The minister disclosed the figure in response to a question from ruling party lawmaker S.M. Jahangir Hossain at a question-and-answer session chaired by Deputy Speaker Kaisar Kamal.
As of April 9 this year, total arrears owed by public and private power plants stood at 52,300 crore taka 88 lakh, the minister said. Of that amount, public and private companies owe Petrobangla 11,634 crore taka 6 lakh for gas bills, while 3,891 crore taka 55 lakh remains outstanding for electricity imports from India. Bank loans held by the country’s power plants total 1,49,311 crore taka 26 lakh, he said.
The minister said fuel cards have been introduced on a trial basis at several filling stations in the Dhaka metropolitan area to bring greater transparency to retail fuel marketing. The system will be rolled out nationwide if the pilot succeeds, he said. The cards will store records of customers’ fuel purchases.
Responding to a question from independent lawmaker Sheikh Mujibur Rahman, Mahmud said the Bangladesh Petroleum Corporation imports 50 percent of its refined fuel under direct contracts with Kuwait, Malaysia, China, the United Arab Emirates, Indonesia, Thailand, Oman and India. The remaining 50 percent is imported through international open tenders.
Crude oil for refining at Eastern Refinery PLC is imported from Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, the minister said. The plant imports between 1.3 million and 1.5 million metric tonnes of crude oil a year. Under normal conditions, all of the imported crude passes through the Strait of Hormuz, while refined fuel imports do not require the route. Overall, about 20 percent to 23 percent of the country’s total fuel imports are transported through the Strait of Hormuz.
In response to a question from ruling party lawmaker Shamsur Rahman Shimul Biswas, Mahmud said the government had begun the process of recovering money looted and smuggled abroad under the previous Awami League government through so-called quick rental power projects.
Influential Awami League leaders and their relatives were among the businessmen who set up those power plants, the minister said, adding that thousands of crore taka had been siphoned out of the country.
Mahmud said the current government has scrapped the controversial special provisions law and issued an ordinance in its place. The ordinance was passed as a bill in the National Parliament on April 7, 2026. The change closes off the arbitrary process used to set up power plants in the past, he said.
The Finance Ministry and Bangladesh Bank are working together to bring looted and laundered money back to the country, the minister added, and tough legal action against those responsible is also under way.
Responding to a question from ruling party lawmaker Mostafizur Rahman Babul, the minister said there was no load-shedding at present relative to demand, but that occasional outages occur because of the global situation, shortages of primary fuel for power generation during peak agricultural and summer demand, limits on transmission and distribution infrastructure, maintenance work and storms.
বাংলায় মূল প্রতিবেদন পড়ুন · Read the original Bengali report