White paper confirms 15-year economic plunder

Considering the enormous and complex task, the committee assigned the job of preparing the white paper on the country's state of economy during the regime of Sheikh Hasina has delivered the report within a very short time. During handing the report over to Chief Adviser Dr. Muhammad Yunus on Sunday, committee members briefly cited the misappropriation and looting of funds from major areas of the economy and siphoning off money. The white paper estimates the annual laundered money at around $16 billion which is more or less the same the Centre for Policy Dialogue (CPD), of which head of the team of this white paper Dr. Debapriya Bhattacharya is a distinguished fellow and boasts his long association with, had figured out earlier. No wonder, the CPD and other such organisations had to their credit doing the homework much earlier and therefore the preparation of the report was not as daunting as was anticipated.

What happens when foul politics makes its presence felt in every sphere of governance starting from local government to the bureaucracy, from the police administration to the judiciary defies belief. This has exactly happened in Bangladesh under the kleptocratic rule of the Awami League. Crony capitalism flourished with the social parasites and party loyalists blatantly enjoying undue advantage at every stage. On the one hand, banks became literally bankrupt due to open looting and laundering of money from those and still new banks were approved, against economists' advice, to operate when the size of the economy was far too limited to accommodate the existing ones. This was further exacerbated by favouring cronies to operate captive power plants at huge costs under a questionable legal provision. The politics of appeasement went further to pamper businessmen who could manipulate the market at will. This exactly explains why market volatility could not be restrained. All this together with bureaucratic involvement in the gargantuan corruption accounted for creation of outrageous social inequality.

While the favoured politicians and bureaucrats have amassed filthy amounts only to siphon those off either to purchase second homes abroad or stash away in deposits to Swiss Bank or other banks in tax havens or both, the country bled white with the result that a lower segment of society became pauperised and marginalised. The country is wobbling and its economy tottering. How the avenues for misappropriation of funds were devised has been highlighted by the report through a few examples. One of those is the scrutiny of seven of the 29 large projects earmarked for Tk100 billion outlay each. The originally estimated Tk1.14 trillion of those seven projects were later revised to Tk1.95 trillion obviously with the ulterior motive of swindling money.

Before the details of the white paper are available, the areas of major expenditure such as the Annual Development Programme (ADP) can also leave a hint at the way money was misused. One of the committee members claims that a total of Tk7.0 trillion was spent on the ADP between 2010 and 2023 but 40 per cent of which was "plundered by bureaucrats". This is unsurprising because had the bureaucracy not acted as cohort to the political patrons, the country with its economy could not slide into this abyss. This should serve as a lesson for political leaderships of the future.