Former AB Bank chairman, two others arrested on money laundering charges

The Anti-Corruption Commission has arrested former AB Bank chairman Wahidul Haque over his suspected involvement in laundering Tk 1.65 billion.

The national anti-graft agency has also arrested former AB Bank official Abu Hena Mostafa Kamal and businessman Saiful Haque, a client of the bank, on the same charges, said Pranab Bhattacharya, a spokesman for the graft watchdog.

They were allegedly involved in money laundering by setting up an offshore company in Singapore.

ACC Deputy Director Bhattacharya said they were detained on Thursday afternoon from Dhaka’s Ramna.

A team led by Assistant Director Gulshan Anwar Pradhan arrested them after filing a money laundering case with the Motijheel police against eight people.

Pranab said the three detainees would be shown arrested in the case later.

The others accused in the case are former managing directors of the bank Md Fazlur Rahman and Shamim Ahmed Chowdhury, Head of Offshore Banking Unit or OBU Mohammad Lokman, Head of Corporate and Structured Finance Division Mahfuz-Ul-Islam and Senior Vice-President Md Nurul Azim.

In the AB Bank money-laundering scam probe, the ACC has questioned 16 people, including the three held on Thursday and two former managing directors and six current directors.

According to the graft-busters, a total of Tk 1.65 billion is believed to have been laundered in the name of investment abroad through Pinnacle Global Fund or PGF, a firm based in the UAE, between October 2013 and June 2014, when Wahidul was the chairman of AB Bank.

The officials involved in the investigation said a decision to raise a $100 million fund—$20 million of AB Bank and $80 million of PGF—and invest it in Dubai was made in 2013.

In February 2014, AB Bank transferred $20 million from one of its offshore units to an account of a bank in Abu Dhabi without the Bangladesh Bank’s permission.

The money was later embezzled, and businessman Saiful and one of his friends, UAE citizen Khurram Abdullah, played a role in the so-called investment and embezzlement of the money, said investigators.

The case dossier referred to a Bangladesh Bank report according to which Saiful became close to Khurram and one Abdus Samad Khan, both members of a fraud ring, when the businessman was in Dubai.

Saiful, who had known Wahidul earlier, introduced the fraud ring to the former AB Bank chairman and they had several meetings in Dubai and Bangladesh, according to the ACC.

The ACC also alleged Wahidul and Abu Hena made a private trip to Dubai to hold meetings with the ring of fraud without informing the bank’s board of directors and created the PGF.

Later, Abu Hena and Shamim placed an imaginary proposal to the board on investing the money in Dubai and had it passed in collusion in 2013, the case said.

Nurul Azim, an official at the AB Bank’s treasury branch, ordered Lokman to transfer the $20 million from the bank’s Chittagong EPZ branch to Dubai without any scrutiny on orders from Wahidul and Abu Hena, the ACC said in the case.

The money was transferred to a bank account of Cheng Bao General Trading LLC in Dubai and later embezzled, the anti-graft body alleged.

ACC believes Saiful, who owns Atlantic Enterprise, was involved in the scam. Saiful is a former director of Sky Aviation Services, an agent of FlyDubai GSA Bangladesh.

In 2016, the Customs Intelligence and Investigation Directorate seized four luxury cars brought by Sky Aviation for dodging duty.

A former official of Standard Chartered Bank, Saiful has no share in AB Bank.

He married a daughter of BNP leader M Morshed Khan, a former foreign minister and the founding chairman of the bank.

Saiful had influenced much of the bank’s work using his connections, the agency said.