Bangladesh up against time to find stolen billions: Central bank governor

New central bank Governor Ahsan Mansur talks about the hunt for wealth transferred out of Bangladesh by political and business elites.

Just days after the collapse of the Awami League government in Bangladesh in August 2024 following deadly street protests that culminated in the dramatic flight of then-Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina, the country’s newly appointed banking chief began a cat-and-mouse hunt for vast amounts of money smuggled abroad by its political and business elites.

Bangladesh Bank has set up 11 specialist teams to track the assets of 11 powerful families accused of laundering billions of dollars to the United Kingdom, the United Arab Emirates, the United States, Malaysia, and Singapore over the past decade.

The amounts of money in question are staggering. Just one of the 11 families under investigation is suspected of moving $15bn worth of funds out of Bangladesh, in one case withdrawing nearly 90 percent of a single bank’s deposits, leaving it close to collapse.

Ahsan Mansur, the former IMF economist who was appointed governor of Bangladesh Bank in the days following the government’s fall, is worried that much of the money could disappear if it is not found quickly enough. “We know that time is of the essence. Erosion of the asset base is a possibility,” he tells Al Jazeera.

The UK is his starting point. Mansur is now in talks with the British Foreign and Commonwealth Office and London law firms in a bid to trace and seize an estimated $25bn laundered from Bangladesh.

“Many of these families have their assets … in London in particular, so we think we will find a lot of assets here,” he says.

“Our whole purpose is at least [to] create awareness that the UK is a favourite destination of stolen assets all over the world, and Bangladesh is one of those countries from where it came,” he says.

A ‘moral imperative’

One person of interest is the former minister of land, Saifuzzaman Chowdhury, who, Al Jazeera’s Investigative Unit (I-Unit) has discovered, owns more than $500m of real estate – mostly in London and Dubai.

Last year, the I-Unit revealed that Chowdhury’s family had bought up more than 360 luxury apartments in the UK, mostly in London.

Bangladesh’s Anti-Corruption Commission has frozen nearly 40 of his bank accounts and placed him under a travel ban, but the central bank is urgently seeking to freeze his overseas properties as well, to stop them from potentially being sold.

Chowdhury claims he is the victim of a politically motivated “witch-hunt” against people associated with the previous government and says his wealth was legitimately earned.

While Bangladesh Bank is focused on freezing assets, Mansur also wants the authorities in the UK and elsewhere to investigate the lawyers, bankers and estate agents who helped to move billions of dollars for the “oligarch” families.

“The law is being flouted, agents or operators, banks in many cases, that are working with the criminals to rehabilitate them in this jurisdiction, which is not the only one. There are many others. I think it’s a moral imperative for the country authorities to take a tougher stance against those things.”

Amnesty for evidence?

Mansur estimates it could take up to five years to regain control of laundered funds and admits progress has been slow as the authorities grapple with the scale and complexity of the task, but says the UK government is helping.

Now he is considering offering plea bargains to those who helped to move money offshore in return for evidence against the kingpins, or even some form of amnesty scheme to bring the missing money back to Bangladesh.

Another key issue is that the complex task of tracking billions of dollars across multiple jurisdictions has been made harder following the change of government in the US.

A team of investigators from the US, who were due to start work in Bangladesh this year, was called off after President Donald Trump froze funding to the US Agency for International Development (USAID) in the early days of his new term.

“They were supposed to be in Dhaka in full force, but it had to be cancelled … a number of our experts … had been funded by USAID, but it was stopped,” Mansur says. “That’s unfortunate for us, but that’s the way it is.”