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Tanvir not arrested yet as he’s close to govt

Alleges Fakhrul

Staff Correspondent
Hall-Mark Group chief Tanvir Mahmud's "political connection with Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina” was the reason why he was not arrested yet in the Sonali Bank loan scam, claimed BNP acting secretary general Mirza Fakhrul Islam Alamgir yesterday.
Fakhrul said he had seen Tanvir receiving a prize from the prime minister at a function in Dinajpur.
He, however, did not say when and where the function was held.
The BNP leader was speaking at a roundtable on “The ongoing corruption and mismanagement in the banking sector including Hall-Mark loan scam” at Hotel Purbani in
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the city. MBA Association of Bangladesh organised the programme.
Fakhrul said that not only a few officials of a Sonali Bank branch but many government high-ups were involved in the Tk 4,000-crorescam.
He also observed that the present condition of the country's banking sector was very fragile.
Former secretary AM Nasiruddin said some state-owned commercial banks had given loans to a few big defaulters mortgaging land at highly inflated prices.
He also alleged that some influential people of the government were taking out huge sums as loans and destroying BASIC Bank, a
state-owned scheduled bank that was once considered sound and stable.
Shamsul Haque, former director of Institute of Business Administration at Dhaka University, said loans worth Tk 21,000 crore had been written off by this government but people did not know who had got those loans.
“Even Bangladesh Bank has now turned into a political organisation,” he added.
Mahmudur Rahman, acting editor of Bangla daily Amar Desh, said the Sonali Bank authorities in the case of loans to Hall-Mark Group failed to notice how much money a single customer was taking. This needed to be investigated, he said.
Former Sonali Bank
chairman Mahbub Ullah said the gross amount of money obtained illegally would surpass the annual budget of the country.
Abu Ahmed, a teacher of Dhaka University, said if the directors of the bank's board had been honest and efficient, the managing directors or other officials would not have dared to indulge in corruption.
In his keynote paper at the roundtable, Syed Abu Naser Bukhtear Ahmed, former managing director of state-owned Agrani Bank, said the loans defaulted now amounted to Tk 29,000 crore, which is 7.17 percent of the totalTk 4.04 lakh crore loan disbursed by public and private commercial banks.