A total of Tk 76,000 crore in illegal assets belonging to Sheikh Hasina, the former prime minister ousted in the mass uprising, her family and 10 top industrial groups — held at home and abroad — has been blocked or seized by court order. Ikhtiar Uddin Mohammad Mamun, head of the Bangladesh Financial Intelligence Unit (BFIU), formally confirmed this at a press conference at the Bangladesh Bank head office on Wednesday.
At the event, he said the frozen assets included about Tk 57,000 crore held within the country and about Tk 19,000 crore held abroad.
Noting that the government and the agencies concerned were working actively to recover assets that had been stolen and laundered abroad, the BFIU chief said: “We hope we will be able to give good news on asset recovery by the end of the year.”
He added that the political identity of any person or institution was not taken into account in cases of suspicious financial transactions.
“We do not look at party lines. When evidence of suspicious activity is found, the relevant bank account is frozen. If anyone from the interim government is involved, that too will come up in the investigation,” he said.
At the annual-report launch, various aspects of the BFIU’s ongoing work and progress in preventing money laundering, identifying suspicious transactions and recovering assets laundered abroad were also presented.
বাংলায় মূল প্রতিবেদন পড়ুন · Read the original Bengali report