Cabinet endorses 7-yr jail for unauthorized banking
The Cabinet on Monday approved the draft of the “Cooperative Society (Amendment) Act 2012” prohibiting banking without prior permission of Bangladesh Bank with a provision of seven years of jail and a fine of Tk 10 lakh for violating the rule.
The cabinet meeting was held at the cabinet division with Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina in the chair.
The government has approved the draft of the Act when some multilevel marketing (MLM) companies including Destiny-2000 were conducting illegal banking activities across the country.
After the meeting, Cabinet Secretary Mohammad Mosharraf Hossain Bhuiyan told reporters that the draft law would be placed at the parliament after vetting by the law ministry.
“Cooperative organisations would never be allowed to use the terminology like ‘bank’, ‘investment’, or ‘commerce’ with its name, and open no branch in anywhere in the country, after enactment of the law,” he said adding, “If any cooperative society open its branches in the country should be closed within six months.”
The cabinet secretary said, the cooperative society would not take any deposit or subscription from non-members, and it would not conduct any credit programme to the non-members of the organisations.
Bangladesh has initiated such a stringent law against illegal banking by so-called cooperative societies as two such organisations namely Destiny and Unipay2u grabbed billions of taka as deposits from hundreds of thousands of poor people across the country.
One of the major MLM companies in Bangladesh, Unipay2u has already disappeared robbing a few hundred millions of taka from the innocent people by alluring them with high profit promises.
Another large cooperative society named JUBOK, which also started illegal banking, was recently shut down by the government and legal proceedings are now being initiated against the promoters of JUBOK for their illegal activities.
Meanwhile, Chief Metropolitan Magistrate (CMM) Court of Dhaka today issued an arrest warrant against three persons including the chairman of Destiny-2000 Limited and managing director of Boishakhi Media Limited Rafiqul Amin in a fraud case.
MNH Bulu, chairman of BNS Group, filed the case against them under section 397 of Companies Act-1994 for 30 million taka on Monday.
The two other accused directors of Boishakhi Media Limited are Irfan Ahmed Sunny and Sayed Sajjad Hossain.
After hearing, Metropolitan Magistrate M Saifur Rahman issued the warrant order against the three accused.
In the complaint, Bulu said the three accused cheated him by taking loan of 30 million taka with a condition that the company must return him the money by November 30, 2008 and took shares of 64,000 taka.
-With The Independent input
