Anis Chowdhury, Khalilur Rahman and Ziauddin Hyder :
The White Paper on the state of Bangladesh’s economy will include a review of “smuggled money”, according to the head of the committee, Debapriya Bhattacharya, entrusted to prepare the White Paper.
We strongly endorse this initiative given the huge scale of stolen assets, but it must not end with a review. It should be accompanied and followed up by vigorous actions to bring back the assets stolen during the fifteen years of despotic rule of the deposed Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina.
Previously Bhattacharya referred to the issue of bringing back siphoned money as “a complex issue”; but this should not dampen the resolve to strongly pursue this important matter. It will likely take many years of sustained efforts to repatriate a significant portion of such assets and the current interim government led by Professor Muhammad Yunus should put in place an action plan supported by necessary mechanisms, including international cooperation arrangements, which would be continuously pursued over the coming years. Strong and sustained political will be critical to the success of these efforts.
Bangladesh can learn from other countries in in its pursuit of recovering stolen assets.
Success cases: A positive trend
It is encouraging that despite complexities and difficulties, there have been cases of significant success based on international cooperation. Over US$10 billion of stolen assets have been returned between 1997 and 2023. Since its inception in 2007, the UN-World Bank joint “Stolen Asset Recovery Initiative” (STaR), helped recover close to US$2 billion stolen assets.
There has been a significant increase in the value of corruption-related assets recovered since 2019, driven partly by large asset returns to Malaysia related to the 1MDB scandal. Increasingly countries are signing agreements and publishing information on corruption-related asset returns. Examples include:
· In January 2024, a court in the US ruled that stolen 2020, the US and Jersey returned US$311 million to Nigeria, traced back to former president Sani Abacha
· By 2004 the Philippines was able to repatriate US$683 million of Ferdinand Marcos money held in Swiss Bank accounts;
· Between August 2001 and 2004, Peru recovered nearly over US$180 million stolen by Vladimiro Montesinos from several jurisdictions such as Switzerland, Cayman Islands and the US;
· Between 2005 and 2006, Nigeria recovered US$505 million of the Sani Abacha money frozen and forfeited by Swiss authorities;
· En assets worth £6.9m should be returned to Nigeria;
· In 2022, the US transferred over US$20.6 million to Nigeria, traceable to the kleptocracy of former Nigerian Dictator General Sani Abacha and his co-conspirators;
· In 2021, the UK returned £4.2 million to Nigeria related to former Governor of Delta State James Ibori and his associates;
· In 2021, the UK returned around £450,000 to Moldova, forfeited from the son of Moldova’s former Prime Minister, Vladimir Filat;
· In 2006, British authorities returned US$1.9 million to Nigeria illicitly gained by DiepreyeAlamieyeseigha, governor of the oil-rich Bayelsa state in Nigeria.
· In 2007, the US and Switzerland repatriated US$84 million to Kazakhstan
As of year-end 2020, the Philippine government recovered P174.2 billion in Marcos ill-gotten wealth and as of 2021, 35 years since the people power revolution, the Presidential Commission on Good Government (PCGG) that Cory Aquino established, has been running after P125.9 billion more in ill-gotten wealth from the Marcos family.
It took more than three decades for the Philippines to recover a significant amount of its assets stolen by Marcos and his family.
Nevertheless, the Philippines case demonstrates the political will to persist and doggedness in pursuit of ill-gotten money. The PCGG is housed proudly in a building recovered from the Marcos family. In 2023, it received government budget of ?166.47 million (US$2.95 million). Its staff have traced money through jurisdictions all over the world and fought their way through hundreds of court cases.
Nigeria and Peru have taken an average of five years to achieve successes. This reflects improvements in the processes and increased international efforts as well as cooperation in recent years.
Haiti cannot be Bangladesh’s role model
The main challenge is the weakening of political will to continue pursuing illicit assets as it happened in post-Jean Claude Duvalier Haiti. The Duvalier case has been a slow and laborious process taking decades to unfold.
Haiti’s lack of political will was highlighted in 1989 by an attorney working on Duvalier’s case on behalf of the Haitian government. According to The New York Times, despite sending twenty-five requests for assistance to Haitian officials regarding cases in New York, by September 1988, Haiti’s government had “inexplicably stopped cooperating-and, not so incidentally, stopped paying its legal bills.”
Renewed asset recovery efforts in the US by the Haitian government of President Aristide yielded only minimal results, with the most well-known being the recovery of US$350,000 from Duvalier’s wife’s account at the Bank of New York.
Why Bangladesh must persist
Notwithstanding complexities, in recent years there have been significant successes due to enhanced law enforcement tools and improved international cooperation from well-meaning countries and financial centres. These help the fight against corruption and impunity.
Recovering stolen assets should not be focused simply on money. It must also be seen as a tool of deterrence as well as fighting the impunity. Stolen asset recovery serves three distinct purposes: (i) recovering monies to fund governments programmes, especially helping the victims of the fallen regime;(ii) providing a semblance of justice for victims of a political culture of impunity; and (iii) deterring officials and politically connected elites from engaging in corruption.
Therefore, the efforts to bring back lost assets should not be regarded as a stand-alone undertaking; but should become an integral part of the agenda of reforming the state so that incentives and opportunities of siphoning off scarce resources are effectively removed.
(Anis Chowdhury is Emeritus Professor, Western Sydney University (Australia) & former Director of UN-ESCAP’s Macroeconomic Policy & Development Division. Khalilur Rahman is former head of economic, social and development affairs at the Executive Office of the UN Secretary-General; former head of UNCTAD’s Technology Division and Trade Analysis Branch and its New York Office and Ziauddin Hyder is former Director Research BRAC and Adjunct Professor, University of the Philippines
at Los Banos.