BB cranks up pressure on Fed, SWIFT to retrieve funds

Bangladesh Bank has taken a new step to put pressure on the Federal Reserve Bank of New York and SWIFT in a bid to retrieve the $81 million that ended up in the Philippines.

As part of the effort, a delegation led by BB Governor Fazle Kabir left Dhaka yesterday for Switzerland to hold talks with top officials of SWIFT and the NY Fed.

Queen's Counsel Ajmalul Hossain, who is handling the issue for the BB, is also a member of the team.

The tripartite meeting is due to be held in Basel on Tuesday, which will be attended by NY Fed President William Dudley.

This will be the first time the BB governor will hold face-to-face meetings with top officials from SWIFT and the Fed since the heist on February 4.

The meeting is being held in Basel as it is the home of the Bank for International Settlements, an organisation of central banks from around the world. The BIS has a Committee on Payments and Market Infrastructures.

BB Spokesman Subhankar Saha said the tripartite meeting will discuss how the money was stolen and how the money could be recovered. 

At the meeting, the BB officials will try to convince the NY Fed to put pressure on the Philippines so that Rizal Commercial Banking Corporation, where the stolen money was wired, returns the funds to BB. 

If RCBC does not return the full $81 million, the BB officials will argue for retrieving the remaining money from the NY Fed as it is also culpable for the theft, said a BB official. 

Officials of SWIFT will also attend the meeting, where BB officials will point out how the Brussels-based organisation’s system was compromised in stealing the reserves and will call for strengthening the platform.  

The BB has prepared a detailed report on the issue in consultation with its lawyers. The report will point out where the NY Fed and SWIFT failed to maintain due diligence, which would have foiled the heist attempt by the hackers.

“The central bank is not thinking about filing a lawsuit at the moment. Rather, it wants to recover the money through arguments, by pointing to the faults of all of the parties involved in the world’s biggest cyber heist,” the official said.

If BB can present its case properly, then there will be no need to go for legal steps to get the money back, the official said, adding that the central bank has substantial evidence to pursue a lawsuit.

Meanwhile in the Philippines, the Senate committee on the case will hold three more hearings by June before giving its verdict. The committee has sought a report from the Philippine central bank.

In consultation with the authorities of the Philippines, BB has also prepared a mutual legal assistance letter to formally initiate the process to bring back money. BB wants the NY Fed to be more active in helping recover the money. The way the NY Fed handled the fund transfer requests made by the hackers has raised questions whether the US institution has maintained proper due diligence before executing the transfer requests and if its transfer request authentication process meets standards.

It now seems, had the NY Fed been cautious about the financial transactions, the funds could have easily been stopped from being channelled into the banks in the Philippines and Sri Lanka, and from there to the pockets of the hackers.

About a month after the heist, for which hackers used malwares to make requests to the NY Fed from BB's account, questions are also being asked how secured is SWIFT, the messaging system through which fund transfer requests are made.

Some believe there is enough evidence to suggest that the SWIFT system was also compromised.

The attackers probably hacked into the software from the SWIFT financial platform, said security researchers at British defence contractor BAE Systems two weeks ago.

Hossain earlier told The Daily Star that at the very least the NY Fed was negligent in not taking appropriate action against the fraudulent payment instructions that were received.

“The Fed requested information from Bangladesh Bank after they had actually made the payments. If the Fed made a query about some doubtful transactions we think it was incumbent upon the Fed to at least send a message to the beneficiaries' bank to hold those payments and not make payments on the instructions of the beneficiaries.”