The Bangladesh Bank (BB) has intensified its monitoring and supervision to gauge the real situation in the country's foreign-exchange market through scrutinising banks' statements.
Under the latest move, the central bank started on Thursday scrutinising the foreign-exchange inflow and outflow statements of each bank.
Forex Reserve and Treasury Management Department (FRTMD) of the central bank sat with senior officials of five commercial banks to get to know their statements, submitted to the central bank earlier.
"We've started scrutiny of such statements to get to know the utilisation of funds by the bank concerned," a BB senior official told the FE.
He also expects that such scrutiny of the statements will be completed by the next week.
During meetings with the bankers, the central bank officials also examined the use of funds, which were purchased from the central bank to settle import payment obligations.
The central bank wing had collected such statements for the last four months from its 'dashboard', another BB official said.
Earlier on February 12, 2013, the BB launched an electronic system, generally known as 'dashboard' for monitoring all kinds of foreign exchange transactions aiming to check fraud and forgery in the country's banking sector.
The dashboard provides summary of export, import, inland back to back letter of credit (LC), inward and outward remittance separately with categorically separated details.
"We'll submit a report with possible market trend in the upcoming months after completing such scrutiny of the statements to the higher authorities concerned," the BB official added.
Meanwhile, the central bank has provided $1.83 billion foreign currency support so far this fiscal year (FY) to the banks for settling import payment obligations.
The BB has resumed giving the support in the recent months through selling the US currency to the banks directly to keep the market stable.
As part of the move, the central bank sold US$ 11 million at market rate directly to six banks on Thursday to meet the growing demand for the greenback in the market.
The US dollar was quoted at Tk 82.98 each in the inter-bank foreign exchange (forex) market on the day unchanged from the previous working day.
Talking to the FE, the BB official said the central bank was selling the US dollar to the banks continuously to help settle their import payment obligations.
The central bank may continue providing such foreign currency support to the banks in line with the market requirement, the BB official hinted.
The market operators, however, said that the demand for the US dollar is increasing gradually, mainly due to higher import payments pressure, particularly of capital machinery, petroleum products, and consumer items including food grains.
Bangladesh's overall imports grew by 13.39 in the first eight months of the FY 2017-18, mainly due to higher import of food grains, industrial raw materials and fuel oils, the officials said.
Actual import in terms of settlement of LCs rose to US$ 33.84 billion during the July-February period in the FY 18 from $ 29.84 billion in the same period of the previous fiscal, the central bank data showed.
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