Oriental Bank Graft
Board rejects BB probe report, claims innocence
Staff Correspondent
The board of directors of the Oriental Bank yesterday rejected the Bangladesh Bank (BB) investigation report about embezzlement of huge sums of money and claimed that no member of the board was involved in any corrupt practices."The board is not involved in any irregularities in the Oriental Bank and if there is any, the management is responsible for it," Mehedi Hasan, a member of the board of directors, told a press conference at a city hotel. He also said that the board is not involved in any routine work of the bank, adding that only the management of the bank maintains records of all transactions. About the siphoning off of Tk 596 crore from the bank as shown in the interim BB probe report, the Oriental Bank director asked to identify the people who got the loans as well as the ones who assisted in providing the loans. He also proposed to conduct a joint investigation, involving them in the process, to look into the allegation. Asked about taking loan under false vouchers, Mehedi Hasan said it's the responsibility of the investigation team to provide necessary documents in favour of its findings. Quoting from the BB probe report, the media recently reported that a few politically powerful shareholders, their friends and top management of the Oriental Bank have defrauded the bank of the huge amount of money through blatantly corrupt methods. Referring to the past five-years' audit reports of the Oriental Bank prepared by the central bank, Mehedi Hasan said, "Why the audit teams of Bangladesh Bank could not identify any irregularity during their regular auditing?" adding that the Bangladesh Bank took over the bank on June 19 this year in the name of acute liquidity crisis and started audit. "We have yet to get any formal report of the ongoing audit activities, but through newspaper reports we came to know that there are irregularities in the bank and in some cases its board members are involved," the Oriental Bank director said terming such findings fictitious and motivated. As an official of the Bangladesh Bank was appointed in the bank as observer since 1994 when it was identified as a problem bank, why did he not report to the central bank if there were any irregularities, the director further asked. Salman Obaidul Karim, another member of the board, was also present at the press conference.
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