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BASIC to hire audit firm to assess current state

Sajjadur Rahman
The newly-appointed board of directors of scam-hit BASIC Bank has decided to hire an audit firm to asses the current position of the state-run bank.
“We are in the process of appointing an expert audit firm that can investigate issues of a bank," Mojib Uddin Ahmed, a director of BASIC Bank, told The Daily Star yesterday.
The appointment will be made by next month, he said.
The directors want detailed insights into the myriad issues of the bank before they formulate their plans to salvage it, Ahmed said.
The government on July 6 dissolved the infamous board of BASIC headed by Sheikh Abdul Hye Bacchu over its role in financial irregularities that cost the lender Tk 4,500 crore in the last four years.
The seven-member board of the bank was dismissed "on the basis of an investigation report of the central bank” on various scams in the bank, the Bank and Financial Institutions Division of the finance ministry had said in a notice.
On July 7, the government appointed a new board led by Alauddin A Majid. The new board found that the bank has no audit reports of its own.
“Whatever information the board has came from Bangladesh Bank and media reports. We need more details and that can be found by an expert audit firm," said Ahmed, who is also the chairman of the tourism and hospitality management department of Dhaka University.
Once the board gets the audit report, it can advise the government on the recovery and requirements of the bank, he said.
Officials of the bank said they have already started talks with big clients of the graft-riddled branches, such as Gulshan, Shantinagar and Dilkusha. Many of these clients have become defaulters.
There are 40 clients who borrowed Tk 50 crore or more from the bank, and more than 500 clients took Tk 1 crore plus.
Bank insiders said many of these borrowers did not pay back any money at all since taking the loans three to four years ago. Many of the loans were given on forged documents and inflated mortgages, they said.
"We will start recovering the loans on a fast-track basis after the Eid holidays," said Ruhul Alam, deputy managing director of the bank.
"Initially, we will focus on the scamhit branches and ask the borrowers why they cannot pay back the loans," he said.