The failures of the Anti-Corruption Commission (ACC), the government agency created two decades back to combat graft, to deliver the goods are legendary. Also, the records of similar other bodies like the Bangladesh Financial Intelligence Unit (BFIU), the Criminal Investigation Department (CID) and the National Board of Revenue (NBR) whose jobs include fighting various financial crimes such as money laundering in close coordination with one another have not been enviable either. How they failed to perform their mandated tasks has been the stuff of media reports for long, especially during the time of the last Awami League-led regime.
The international anti-corruption watchdog, the Transparency International Bangladesh (TIB), called for overhauling the aforementioned government agencies as they were found to be what it said partisan and ineffective in holding a former land minister of the fallen Hasina government and his wife, who possess fabulous amount of undeclared assets, to account, only adds to the story. The irony is, as pointed out in a TIB report published earlier, the afore-mentioned agencies failed to take necessary action against the said minister and his wife, though there was ample evidence about their corruption. Notably, the TIB has been consistently complaining about the failures of the entities like the ACC to function properly. It was not just the lack of courage on the part of the ACC or the bureaucracy that was at fault. On the contrary, the anti-graft body has always been way behind its core tasks.
A case in point was the dismissal of an investigating officer of the ACC by the anti-graft agency's higher authority as the investigator unearthed massive corruption involving land acquisition by a powerful syndicate in Chattogram. On a number of occasions, such dubious role played by the anti-graft body naturally raised questions about not just capacity, but its very probity and integrity.
In a similar vein, the BFIU's role in enabling the anti-graft bodies to conduct investigations into corruption cases by providing necessary information on suspicious activities and transactions in the banks and other financial institutions has also been questionable. Consider that in a report published in February this year, it was revealed that over the past five years, suspicious financial transactions increased by about 300 per cent and 90 per cent of those took place in the banking sector. But one would like to ask how many of those Suspicious Transaction Reports (STRs) were analysed to track down the perpetrators of actual financial crimes. Instead of that, just saying that all such suspected transactions were not necessarily instances of money laundering, as some senior executives of BFIU actually did, does not exonerate them from their responsibility of analysing each of the STRs meticulously to find out the genuine instances of money laundering or other forms of financial crime. That was also not an impossible task given that there is no dearth of digital tools to do the job. Unfortunately, far from doing their job professionally and impartially, these anti-graft bodies became tools in the hands of government to harass its political opponents. As things stand, effecting a massive reform, as recommended by the TIB, is the right option to render the anti-graft bodies useful and effective.
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