The Bangladesh Bank (BB) is going to follow recommendations of the International Monetary Fund (IMF) regarding its stolen fund, and will show the fund in other assets as protested bill in its balance-sheet.
The central bank will also examine another recommendation of IMF for keeping provision against the stolen fund, if necessary, in accordance with the existing rules, regulations and accounting norms.
The decisions were taken at a meeting of the central bank board of directors, held at its headquarters on Thursday with BB Governor Fazle Kabir in the chair.
Though IMF recommended keeping provision against the stolen fund, BB is still not doing the same, as the process of recovering the fund is on and there is a possibility of getting it back.
"Since we are not going for provisioning, we will give a note in our balance-sheet, mentioning that the recovery initiatives of the stolen money are going on," a BB senior official told the FE after the meeting.
Currently, the central bank is counting its reserve in line with the International Financial Reporting Standard (IFRS). So the stolen US$ 81 million has already been deducted from the reserve, the central banker added.
Meanwhile, the BB board also decided not to strike any fresh deal with the US cyber security firm FireEye for caring out further investigation into the cyber heist that took place in early February.
The company has already submitted its forensic analysis report to the central bank after completing 750 hours analysis on the cyber heist, according to the BB official.
He also said the cyber security firm has offered 700 hours more with a charge of $ 400 per hour for further investigation into the matter.
"We're not interested to hire the US firm further because of higher cost and lack of specific timeframe for completing its investigation," the central banker added.
The firm initially indentified that attackers deployed sophisticated malware into SWIFT servers to authorise transactions.
The cyber fraud took place on the night of February 4 through sending a total of 35 transfer orders into the US Federal Reserve Bank in New York, where the central bank of Bangladesh maintains a foreign-exchange account.
Nearly $ 20 million of the $ 101 million siphoned off money was recovered from Sri Lanka. The lion's share of the money landed in the Philippines.
