Bangladesh Bank has started investigation to unearth money laundering by local businesspeople through import of sea fish from the countries of Middle East, said officials of the central bank. The BB has taken the initiative in line with the commerce ministry directives, they said. The commerce ministry sent a letter to the BB on June 1, 2014 saying that it had recently received allegation from Bangladesh Marine Fisheries Association (BMFA) that some importers were involved in money laundering through import of sea fish.
In accordance with the commerce ministry directives, the BB has already asked scheduled banks to send the import data of sea fish to the central bank.
The BMFA told the commerce ministry that some countries of Middle East had set up rigs in the ocean to extract petroleum products.
Due to extraction process, huge quantity of sea fishes usually die and those fishes become toxic for the human health.
Some local businesspeople imported those toxic fishes to the local market at a higher cost.
But the importers showed lower price for the sea fish avoiding the actual price in the commercial invoice of the import process, the BMFA alleged.
The importers later paid the import price through the hundi channel causing the country to lose huge amount of foreign exchange, it alleged.
Importers usually bring in lobsters, cuttle fish, squid and octopuses.
A BB official told New Age on Thursday that the BB had already asked the banks to provide the import related data of the sea fish.
The BB will send inspection team if it discovers any suspicious information from any bank about the import of sea fish, he said.
He said that the central bank had recently received a number of allegations about money laundering.
He said the import of huge amount of capital machinery in recent months had already raised suspicion that money laundering might have occurred in the process.
The import of capital machinery had declined sharply in FY13 but it increased in recent months of the outgoing fiscal year despite having unfriendly business environment in the country amid political uncertainty, he said.
Against the backdrop, the Anti-Corruption Commission and the BB were conducting an enquiry to detect the real cause of increasing trend in import of capital machinery.
But the two organisations were yet to discover any findings in this regard.
He said that the importers showed higher prices than the original prices of the products in the import form if they wanted to launder money through the over-invoicing.
On the other hand, the exporters show lower price than the real price of their exported products in the export form in order to launder money through under-invoicing process, he said.
-With New Age input
