BNP leader Ishraque Hossain acquitted in ACC case

A Dhaka court has acquitted BNP leader Ishraque Hossain of the Anti-Corruption Commission charges for not submitting his asset statement.

Ishraque has been cleared as the notice for wealth statement submission was not served on him in time. And the state failed to prove the complaints against him, Judge Sheikh Nazmul Alam said in his verdict on Monday.

“I was given the notice during the illegal 1/11 government. I was a student and abroad at that time,” Ishraque told reporters outside the court after the verdict.

“This verdict is a victory for the people,” he said.

Ishraque, a member of the BNP’s Central Executive Committee, is the son of late Dhaka mayor and BNP leader Sadeque Hossain Khoka. He also contested in the Dhaka South City Corporation election in February as the party’s mayor candidate but lost.

“This verdict is what we’ve expected. We’ve got justice in the case based on a conspiracy,” said his legal counsel Nuruzzman Tapan.

ACC counsel Ali Haider Chowdhury was not available for comment.

In September, 2008, the ACC had issued a notice to Ishraque and his sister Sarika Sadeque asking them to submit a wealth statement including movable, immovable assets owned by them, their dependants, or owned by their representatives, liabilities, loans and also state the sources of their wealth by seven working days.

It also filed two cases at the Ramna Police Station in August 2010 as Ishraque and Sarika failed to submit the statements.

Tapan, the lawyer for Ishraque, had claimed that his client had not received the ACC notice as he had been abroad.

The ACC had not sent the notice to both addresses mentioned in the case either, Tapan had said.

“And there had not been any neutral witness when the notice had been put up at the Mayor House in the presence of different government officials,” he had added.

A court had sentenced Khoka to 10 years in jail in a corruption case two years ago.

Khoka, who had been in the US at the time of the verdict, died there in November 2019.