Officials recovered the bottles as part of a government crackdown amid a significant crisis in the cooking oil market.
After the recovery of 2,328 litres of soybean oil from a retailers’ house at Chattogram’s Fatikchhari on Sunday, the authorities found another 1,050 litres at Khaja Store, a shop at Karnaphuli Market in Sholoshahar.
Khaja Store’s owner Abdul Hakim was fined Tk 40,000 for hoarding oil and expired ghee, as was Akhter Hossain, who has a convenience shop at Heyako Bazar in Fatikhchhari, under the Essential Commodities Act in a mobile court raid.
Md Fayez Ullah, a deputy director of the directorate, said they found the depot after going down through stairs in a tunnel under Khaja Store.
The owner claimed he was a supplier at the start of the operation but failed to present documents to corroborate it, later confessing to officials that he had hoarded the oil at the start of Ramadan.
The authorities found bottles of one, two, three and five litres and ordered Hakim to sell them off at retail prices.
Earlier, Magistrate SM Alamgir, also an assistant commissioner (land), said his team raided Akhter’s house in South Gozaria village based on a tip-off.
“We’ve recovered oil in sealed bottles of 1, 2 and 3 litres. The bottles have price labels of Tk 160 per litre, which definitively proves that these [the bottles] were stored before the price had gone up the last time,” Alamgir said.
Akhter, however, claimed that he had been selling bottled cooking oil at Tk 180 per litre. But soybean oil was sold at different shops at upwards of Tk 200 per litre.
On May 5, the price of soybean oil was increased by Tk 38 per litre across the country to Tk 198.
According to reports, there was still a shortage of cooking oil in the market despite the price hike.
The suppliers claimed that cooking oil stock has yet to hit the market.
Market insiders and government stakeholders are saying that the price hike was made to normalise supply, which was severely interrupted due to higher raw material costs on the international market and rising shipping costs.
The situation worsened as the war between Russia and Ukraine broke out, and Indonesia, one of the largest suppliers of cooking oil, imposed a ban on exports of palm oil on Apr 28.
As a result, cooking oil disappeared from many retail shops in Dhaka, as well as the rest of the country, before Eid-ul-Fitr. Soybean oil supply has not yet become normal.
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