UAE group getting MoU on Bay terminal investment extended

The government is extending the tenure of a memorandum of understanding (MoU) under which the Abu Dhabi Ports Group wants to invest in the potential port sector of Bangladesh, while an impasse keeps other scrambling foreign investors at bay.An impasse...

Dhaka-Ctg highway widening project faces further delay

The widening of the country's prime highway along Dhaka-Chattogram corridor is unlikely to begin soon, as the over Tk 700 billion project has not been included into the next year's Annual Development Programme despite being considered a priority.Sources said the...

Base rate of import AT may rise for one-time settlement

Commercial imports are set to be levied 7.5-percent advance tax as the government may increase the AT base rate at import stage, for one-time settlement, in the upcoming budget.The advance tax, collected at import stages from commercial imports, might be...

Price of broiler chicken and day-old chicks collapses

Broiler chicken farmers have been hit hard by a drastic fall in the price of broiler chicken. Many farmers are unwilling to buy another next batch of day-old broiler chicks until price of live broilers increases. This has led to...

Addressing price gaps can arrest inflation

The Bangladesh Bank (BB) carried out a study on five kinds of essential agricultural produce in 14 districts of the country in January this year to know about the reason behind the atrocious price gaps between farm and consumer levels....

Ambitious reforms urgent for Bangladesh to attract FDI

Bangladesh urgently needs ambitious reforms to attract more foreign direct investment (FDI) and stimulate domestic private investment by ensuring better coordination among government agencies - especially on policy matters. In an interview with The Financial Express, Hoe Yun Jeong, the...

Indian port restrictions: BD needs a coordinated response

The land port restrictions imposed by the Directorate General of Foreign Trade (DGFT), Ministry of Commerce, Government of India, on several export items — including key products such as apparel — have dealt a significant blow to Bangladesh’s exports. If...

A clean slate for BD's banks?

The numbers are ugly. Bangladesh's non-performing loans (NPLs) have exploded to over Tk 3.45 trillion by the end of 2024. When you include restructured and written-off loans, the bad asset mountain rises to a staggering Tk 4.75 trillion-about a third...

Health budget cut runs counter to reform ambition

The education and health sectors have historically been neglected in government budget allocations, resulting in excessive commercialisation and high out-of-pocket expenses for citizens. Many had high hopes that the interim government would break this trend by prioritising these two critical...

1965: a revisit six decades on

Every year has its importance, for in its distinctive way it has an impact on history. When decades or generations later we travel back to the years that once gave us glimpses into the working of human affairs, we are...

IFIC Bank to focus on MSMEs, agro sector: Chairman

IFIC Bank has planned to streamline its business policy by focusing on micro, small, and medium enterprises (MSMEs) and the agriculture sector, aiming to bring more unbanked people into the banking network, the bank's top policymaker has said."We want to...

CCH collects Tk 628b in taxes in 10 months of FY25

CHATTOGRAM, May 19: The Chittagong Custom House (CCH) collected a total of Tk 628.18 billion in taxes in the first ten months of fiscal year (FY) 2024-25.CCH sources said a drop in imports of some goods, as well as the...

National trade, import disrupted for taxmen’s strike

A prolonged pen-down protest by revenue officials demanding the scrapping of an ordinance that bifurcated their board takes a heavy toll on total supply-chain management of imports, besides tax-collection slowdown.Meanwhile, the protesting officials of the National Board of Revenue (NBR)...

Saving peasants from thunderbolts

Frequency of thunderstorms and their attendant lightning strikes are increasing globally and the culprit is global warming. The issue has been discussed multiple times on different occasions in the media. The fact that the country's peasants are dying in increasing...

Elegy for the dead and dying of occupied Palestine

Elegy is usually used for the dead. In the absence of an equally emotive word to convey the feelings of grief and remorse for those who are dying in plain sight on television screen of viewers, the same nomenclature can...

How ICB's dividend plan for FY25 may boomerang on unitholders

The state-run Investment Corporation of Bangladesh (ICB) has proposed that mutual funds (MFs) be allowed to distribute dividends from profits in the current fiscal year without meeting provisional requirements but experts say it will cause capital erosion. Both fund managers...

Tax ceiling up, corporate rates rise

Tax-free income threshold for all individual taxpayers is going up and corporate rates are being raised in the new budgetary measures ready for the chief adviser's perusal today (Monday).Essential commodities are, however, spared from tax hikes as inflation bites all...

Can local ISPs survive the coming storm?

The internet revolution in Bangladesh did not begin with global tech giants or mobile operators. It began with local Internet Service Providers (ISPs) who, through personal grit and grassroots innovation, laid fibre optic cables across alleys, towns, and remote areas....

Double standard of political leadership

So, Donald Trump has made a great discovery, "A lot of people are starving" in the Gaza Strip. This brief remark, notably, comes at a time when the first foreign tour of his second term saw him about to conclude...

Protecting marginal chicken farmers

The country's poultry sector is again in distress. But it is not due to any manmade crisis often created in the sector by the so-called profit-hungry syndicates. As in the past years, here nature is at work. A report published...

Fresh STP estimates big-budget investment worth $59b

A big-budget investment of US$59 billion is estimated in an updated strategic plan to improve Dhaka's transport system as officials say lacking in planning heretofore resulted in the capital city's deteriorating traffic situation.The investment requirement has been proposed in the...

IDRA calls for probe as insurers refuse to provide data alleging corruption

The Insurance Development and Regulatory Authority (IDRA) has requested the government to find out if there were any irregularities when a digital information system was introduced in 2019 to ensure accountability of insurers.It sent a letter on Saturday to the...

Suhrawardy Udyan tragedy a wake-up call

The shocking murder of Dhaka University student Shahriar Alam Shammo has once again brought to the fore concerns over students' security on the campus, the country's prime seat of higher education. Shammo, a master's student at the Institute of Education...

Renewing inland water trade & transit protocol

Even before the independence of Bangladesh, the waterway was one of the key modes for the movement of freights with India like it was historically the case through the railway. Most of the railway network of Bangladesh was also built...

US buyers may turn to countries with lower tariff exposure, fears BFTI

US buyers may attempt to shift the tax burden onto Bangladeshi exporters or divert their orders to countries with lower tariff exposure, potentially undermining Bangladesh's position as the world's second-largest apparel exporter.The Bangladesh Foreign Trade Institute (BFTI) feared it in...

Hefty interest payments to cost Tk 1.22 trillion

Significant rises in domestic and overseas borrowings make the government earmark some Tk 1.22 trillion for hefty interest payments in the upcoming budget, and officials see no letup in liability increases in the near future.Experts see high debt stock, interest-rate...

Project on cards to set up chord line

CHATTOGRAM, May 16: The government has decided to build a chord line of the Dhaka-Chattogram railway with an eye to reducing travel time and distance between the capital and the port city.Bangladesh Railway (BR) officials said the new line would...

Understanding liberty, liberation, independence and emancipation

Amar mukti alloy alloy ei akashey,/ amar mukti dhulai dhulai ghase ghase. Poignant and elevating, the song cannot but resonate with all receptive souls. Now what kind of 'mukti'---liberty, freedom or emancipation---Rabindranth is referring to here? Or, is there any...

Regulator wants it spent on investor protection, brokers prefer to keep it

Stockbrokers are at loggerheads with the securities regulator over the utilisation of interest income earned from investors' idle funds kept in a bank account namely Consolidated Customer Account (CCA). The Bangladesh Securities and Exchange Commission (BSEC) wants the money to...

Mind behind monstrous acts of homicide

If the ultimate crime is homicide, Bangladesh has perhaps been witnessing a higher incidence of it lately. The recent surge in murder has a fair share in political vendetta. But this has also acted as a powerful provocation for settling...