Court jails former Sonali Bank MD Humayun Kabir, 8 others for loan scams

A Dhaka court has sentenced nine people, including a former managing director of Sonali Bank, to 17 years in jail for embezzlement of Tk 2.7 million through loan forgery.

Judge Md Iqbal Hossain delivered the verdict on Wednesday.

The convicts are former Sonali Bank MD Humayun Kabir, DMD Mainul Haque, GM Nani Gopal Nath, DGM Sheikh Altaf Hossain and Safiz Uddin Ahmed, AGM Kamrul Hossain Khan and Saiful Hasan and Paragon Knit Composite MD Saiful Islam Raja and Director Abdullah Al Mamun.

Each convict will serve 10 years in jail for the fund embezzlement. They were also fined a total of Tk 2.7 million, said public prosecutor Shawkat Alam.

Also, each of them was jailed for seven years for forgery along with a Tk 50,000 fine. They will have to serve another three months behind bars in case of failure to pay the fine.

Both sentences will run concurrently, with each of the convicts serving 10 years in prison.

Mainul Haque, Safiz Uddin, Sheikh Altaf and Kamrul Hossain were present in the dock during the verdict announcement. The court issued an arrest warrant for the fugitives.

The Anti-Corruption Commission filed the case with Ramna Model Police Station in 2013 over the embezzlement of more than Tk 2.7 million. Following an investigation, Moshiur Rahman, assistant director of the ACC, submitted the complaint to the court in 2014.

The convicts in the case were also suspects in other cases the ACC filed over the Hall-Mark scam. Humayun, who was suspended from the bank, went into hiding after the court issued an arrest order.

Humayun, the then managing director and CEO of Sonali Bank, the largest state-owned bank, embezzled Tk 25 billion through the Hall-Mark scam.

In 2021, a Dhaka court ordered jail sentences for Humayun and 10 others over the embezzlement of Tk 13.7 million.