**Letters for publication in these columns should be addressed to the Editor and legibly written or typed with double space. For reasons of space, short letters are preferred, and all are subject to editing and cuts. Pseudonyms are accepted. However, all communications must bear the writer's real name, signature and address.**

My offspring not my relative!

Sir. Believe it or not. it is true, at least the Securities & Exchange Commission (SEC) thinks that your own sons and daughters cannot be classified as your relatives.

Through a Government Gazette Notification of April 28. 1996. the SEC promulgated the Merchant Banker and Portfolio Manager Regulations 1996 after much hullabaloo for the last two years. At Section 15. the regulation states that no merchant banker or any of its director, partner, manager or chief executive shall either on their respective accounts or through their associates of relatives enter into any transac-- tion in securities or acquisition of shares of a company on the basis of unpublished pricesensitive information obtained by them during the course of any professional assignment either from the customers, or otherwise.

The section also provides an explanation of the term 'relative' as to include father, mother, father-in-law. mother-in-law. spouse, brother, sister, brother-in-la^. sister-in-law, - son-in-law or daughter-in-law. This explanation amazingly excludes sons and daughters in the categorisation of relatives!

The undersigned vividly recalls working on a response from the DCCI way back in December 1994 on a draft• of the referred regulation, circulated for comments and suggestions, wherein among others, this lapse was pointed put’ for rectification. A copy of the suggested changes/inclusions was also personally forwarded by the undersigned to the chairman of the SEC at that time.

While taking pleasure in finding acceptance and incorporation of some of the suggestions. we wonder how on earth Could SEC refuse to recognise my own ■offsprings as my relative! Something is really rotten somewhere in the Commission.

Yawer Sayeed

House No. 25. Road-4 (New), Dhanmondi R/A.

Dhaka-1205

"Bureaucracy of the Republic"

' Sir. 1 like to draw the attention of the Prime Minister regarding her recent declaration that she considers the Civil Servants as servants of the Republic and that they are directly accountable to the people and not to any party government. I would respectfully beg to differ and would like -to

request her to reconsider her statement, whjle implementing her pledge to reality

The government servants are. in fact, servants of the Republic no doubt and they are answerable to the people as it is the people who make the provision of their salary through their tax payment. However. what is the practical way to achieve this accountability without a medium or an interlace? The medium through which this accountability shall be achieved is the .government formed by the people and for the people. It is the people's government, through which the people are represented at the seat of the government, which again, belongs to the people.

Bureaucracy forms the machinery which shall be utilised by the government to implement the commitments they made in their election manifestoes. In the multi-party democracy one or more party shall form a government. A party government therefore in all essence is the people's representative body. Being accountable to the people's government would therefore me-, an being accountable to the people. All civil and military services must - therefore remain subservient to the government of the people, without which the functioning of the government would simply cease!

We believe by declaring the government servants not answerable to the party government. the Prime Minister has relieved the bureaucracy from being accountable to any one at all. For long, our bureaucracy ■ had been maintaining a position of considering itself being superior to all and in practice tend to defy being accounted for to any one. Under such a si tuation. contrary to her declaration. it is necessary that her Sjovernment exerts more eforts to make them accountable so that people's wishes are implemented in the way they wanted and at the cost at which it is justified.

We therefore believe the PM's declaration will bring a negative effect towards responsible management of the statecraft and we are afraid the PM and her government will soon be facing casualties themselves. from the bureaucracy which she has started to appease. '

Her government has to go a long way and the powerful horse she is about to ride to traverse this distance is not a tame one!

Nurul Basher Saudi Arabia