Bangladesh estimates $16 billion siphoned yearly under Hasina rule

By Arun Devnath

An average $16 billion may have been illicitly siphoned out of Bangladesh annually during former Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina’s 15-year rule, according to the findings of a committee formed by interim leader Muhammad Yunus.

The panel led by economist Debapriya Bhattacharya submitted a white paper on the state of Bangladesh’s economy to Yunus in Dhaka on Sunday, according to a government statement.

Sheikh Hasina was ousted by student protesters in August after 15 years of increasingly authoritarian rule. The army and protest leaders tapped Nobel laureate Yunus, who pioneered microcredit to the poor, to lead an interim government.

“Our blood curdles to know how they plundered the economy,” Yunus said in the statement. “The sad part is they looted the economy openly. And most of us could not summon courage to confront it.”

The document shows “the economy we inherited after the July-August mass uprising,” he said.

Leaders in Sheikh Hasina’s party are in jail or hiding in Bangladesh, or have left the country. The party doesn’t have a spokesperson who can be contacted to comment on allegations in the white paper.

As part of its investigations, the committee looked into seven large projects out of 29 which had more than 100 billion taka ($836 million) expenditure outlay each.

The initial cost of the seven projects examined was estimated at 1.14 trillion taka. Hasina’s government later revised project costs to 1.95 trillion taka through the addition of more components and inflated land prices among others, according to the statement.

“The problem is deeper than what we have thought,” Bhattacharya said, adding that the 400-page white paper will show “how crony capitalism gave birth to the oligarchs, who controlled the policy framing.”