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No death penalty for note forgery

Central bank discards proposal after German reaction

Staff Correspondent
The central bank yesterday said it would ditch a proposal seeking death penalty for currency forgers after Deutsche Bundesbank threatened to pull out from a cooperation agreement with Bangladesh on anti-counterfeiting.
Bangladesh Bank Governor Atiur Rahman told The Daily Star, “The proposal is being called back.
“Ours is a central bank with a human face and the death penalty in this case goes against our principles.”
The Deutsche Bundesbank, the German central bank, has been providing consultation and advisory services for central banks around the world for decades. The counterfeit prevention programme between Bangladesh Bank and the German bank was due to begin next month.
"It had not been aware of the death-penalty threat when it offered consultation and training services on counterfeit prevention as part of its cooperation activities,” the German bank said in a statement onThursday.
The Bundesbank said: “While the Bundesbank
believes that counterfeiting is a serious criminal offence, it considers the threat of imposing the death penalty to be excessive."
“Unless Bangladesh clearly and irrevocably drops these plans, the Bundesbank will terminate the consultation project before it has begun,” said the bank.
The statement from the German bank came after the media quoted Bangladesh Bank Executive Director Ashim Kumar Dasgupta as saying: "A law providing even death penalty for counterfeiting currency is under consideration.”
However, Governor Atiur said inadvertently and with-out due review, Bangladesh's central bank had sent a proposal for imposing death penalty for counterfeiting to the finance ministry on January 2,2013.
This came following arrests of 10 people in October, 2012, for allegedly printing 88,000 Indian rupees and Tk 2.5 crore of currency notes.
A Bangladesh Bank official said the central bank moved fast after Bundesbank threatened to pull out of the deal.
"This draft has gone to the ministry inadvertently. I have already asked the deputy governor concerned to recall the draft act immediately," the governor told Juergen Sterlepper, director of the centre for technical central bank cooperation of Deutsche Bundesbank, in an email correspondence.
"Germany is strictly against the death penalty," Sterlepper wrote to Atiur. "Therefore, we regret that we cannot continue our planned cooperation as long as death penalty for counterfeiting currency is considered or introduced," said Sterlepper.
The governor asked the German bank to consider the Bangladesh Bank's new position on the death penalty.
Bangladesh Bank plans to introduce an analysis centre in Dhaka for combating currency counterfeiting with assistance from the Deutsche Bundesbank in the framework of Technical Central Bank Cooperation.