Two officials of Bangladesh Bank went to the Philippines to help Bangladesh's embassy in Manila beef up efforts to recover the money stolen by cyber thieves.

"Our envoy is working hard to recover the funds," said Subhankar Saha, the BB spokesman."The two BB officials will assist him," Saha said. He spoke to reporters after a meeting of the coordination council of regulators at the BB headquarters.

The Senate of the Philippines is now investigating the case after the funds slipped into the country, and one Filipino bank, one remittance company and a number of casinos were implicated. Bangladesh's Ambassador to the Philippines John Gomes also attended a Senate hearing.

One casino junket operator has already returned $4.6 million of the $81-million stolen funds to the Anti-Money Laundering Council of the Philippines.

Representatives of the BB, the Insurance Development and Regulatory Authority

(IDRA), Bangladesh Securities and Exchange Commission, the Microcredit Regulatory Authority, Bangladesh Telecommunication Regulatory Commission and the Department of Cooperatives attended the meeting. The coordination council discussed issues such as depositing insurers' funds to non-banking financial institutions, bond market and SIM registration.

The IDRA has capped the amount, which an insurer will be able to invest of their life funds or reserve in the nonbanking financial institutions, at 10 percent, according to a central bank official who was present at the meeting.

The regulators also discussed ways to activate the bond market.