DC office submits report to land ministry
The deputy commissioner’s office of Dhaka has found that around 10 acres of the government land, including vested property, has been grabbed by the controversial Hallmark Group in Savar.
The DC office in a report said that Hallmark had encroached on 9.9267 acres of ‘khas and vested property’ raising boundary walls to keep the entire area of around 200 acres under its control, said officials.
‘We have submitted our report to the land ministry on the khas land and vested property illegally occupied by Hallmark Group,’ DC Mohibul Haque told New Age on Sunday.
He said the district administration would take legal action as per directives of the higher authorities. ‘We are awaiting instructions from the land ministry,’ said the district administrator, who also holds the rank of district magistrate.
The DC submitted the report to the land ministry last week with a sketch map of the land claimed by the company and now under investigation by the Anti-Corruption Commission.
The land ministry on September 11 asked the deputy commissioner of Dhaka to prepare a report on the land property possessed by Hallmark Group, which has allegedly embezzled Tk 2686.14 crore from the state-owned Sonali Bank through spurious documents.
When his attention was drawn to the official report on Hallmark’s land in Savar, state minister for land Mostafizur Rahman declined comments at this stage.
Savar assistant commissioner (land) Abu Zafar Rashed told New Age that
the local land office had also investigated an allegation that Hallmark had grabbed a privately-owned plot of land.
‘It’s true, we have found the allegation against the company,’ he said, adding that all the plots under the ownership of the company had not been mutated yet.
The ministry initiated the move to look into how much government land had been grabbed by Hallmark in Savar and whether all the plots shown as the company’s own property to Sonali Bank actually belonged to it as there were allegations of massive irregularities in the financial deal, said officials.
The documents show that the company had grabbed government land in three mouzas – Nandakhali, Bharari and Kandiboilarpur – under Savar upazila, about 25 kilometres from Dhaka city.
The land ministry sought the report in the face of allegations that the little known Hallmark Group had grabbed both government and private plots of land and shown them as its own property by producing forged documents to the bank for loans, a senior official said.
The ACC has already launched an investigation in Sonali Bank’s ‘illegal lending’ of Tk 3,547 crore to the Hallmark Group and five other companies, and is hunting for the people involved in the country’s biggest financial scam in recent times.
Hallmark’s managing director Tanvir Mahmud was not available for comments over the allegations of land grabbing.
It has been reported that the company had claimed around 1,000 acres of land as its own property though the area includes khas (government owned) lands and privately-owned plots.
Courtesy of New Age
