Int’l call tampering costs BTCL Tk 1,500cr

Bangladesh Telecommunications Company Limited (BTCL) has suffered a loss of about Tk 1,500 crore for erasing call records from its international truck exchange (ITX), says a study of the Transparency International Bangladesh (TIB). It reveals that there was no international calls record at the BTCL ITX located at city’s Mohakhali during January 2011 to November 2012 while the officials of the ITX in collusion with others deleted the call records showing technical faults at the exchange. The BTCL ITX receives the international incoming calls through the international gateway and the ITX diverts the calls to the ICX (interconnection exchange) to reach it to the mobile operators. TIB programme manger (research and policy) Dipu Roy presented the findings of the study, ‘BTCL: Challenges of Good Governance and Way Forward’ at BRAC Centre Inn on Wednesday. According to the study, the BTCL showed calls of 5.79 billion minutes in its call records against the total calls of 8.5 billion minutes in 2011 despite the increasing trend of making international calls. It identified that former officials of BTCL’s maintenance and operation division and officials of the ministry concerned were involved in call tampering causing a huge amount of losses to the state-owned telecommunications company, according to UNB.