Money launderers in RMG sector have robbed the nation’s future

In one of the biggest money laundering scams unearthed so far in the country, customs authorities have found that 33 readymade garment factories and buying houses laundered at least Tk 821 crore over the last six years.

For the illicit money transfer, the fraudsters employed two tactics – under-invoicing and using the wrong shipping code.

In the first case, prices were shown up to 10 times lower than the actual rate.

In the second case, shipments were shown as “samples” when they were actually exports worth hundreds of crores of taka.

Multiple gangs are involved here. Documents show Dhaka-based buying house Asia Trading Corporation shipped 14,085 tonnes of clothing items worth Tk 308 crore to the UAE, Singapore, and Malaysia in 2022.

However, not even a single dollar entered the country against this shipment.

Similarly, Hong Kong Fashion exported 1,160 tonnes of RMG goods worth Tk 43.21 crore to seven countries.

Only Tk 12.73 crore has been brought back to the country against these shipments, while the remaining Tk 30.48 crore was laundered.

Customs Intelligence and Investigation Directorate (CIID) came up with the findings after a six-month investigation carried out in three phases, beginning in January this year.

The CIID analysed the export data of these companies from January 2017 to May 2023.

Most of the 33 exporters and buying houses whose names came up in the customs investigation are located in Dhaka and Gazipur.

To launder money, fraudsters often use Code 20 on the NBR server, which denotes sending “samples” to the importers before the actual export.

In this case, there is no question of export earnings.

Another popular way to launder money is under invoicing – either by quoting low prices or low weights of the export items in the shipping documents.

The looters not only misappropriate the economy but also loot the country’s future when the political game makers are busy in their fortune making and the ordinary people are in peril without their rights and repeated denial of rights to protest the anomaly.

In the absence of democracy and accountability, economic development cannot be sustained.

The government in power to control the misappropriation is the chief beneficiary of the laundering, so hope becomes despair for the nation.