BTCL MD, 22 others sued

The Anti-Corruption Commission yesterday lodged four cases against the managing director of the state-owned Bangladesh Telecommunications Company Ltd and 22 others allegedly for misappropriating over Tk 607 crore by erasing international incoming call records.
The cases were filed with Banani Police Station in the capital. Of the accused, 20 are former and present officials of BTCL, including its Managing Director (MD) Mohammad Kalimullah, two retired MDs -- SM Khabiruzzaman and Afsar Alam -- former MD Azizul Islam, who has been made officer on special duty, and former MD Abu Sayeed Khan.
The remaining three accused are Ericsson Bangladesh's country manager Asif Zahid, relations manager Nazrul Islam and ex-engineer Mashrurul Hakim.
The BTCL officials in league with Ericsson Bangladesh's misappropriated the money between August 2009 and November 2012, erasing international call records from the call details recorder at the BTCL office in Mohakhali, according to the case statements.
The anti-graft watchdog took a year from April, 2012 to complete an investigation into the scam, said ACC Deputy Director SM Shahidur Rahman.
During the probe, investigators found that though the Ericsson officials were not suppossed to have had access to the Mohakhali BTCL exchange room, the trio had often entered it only to help BTCL officials do the scam.
BTCL had no maintenance agreement with Ericsson Bangladesh, he added.
Ericsson supplied software for the two sub-exchanges in Mohakhali, Shahidur said, adding Ericsson had installed the software.
The ACC investigation team collected information from Mohakhali International Exchange Office, visiting its computer centres, and gathered international call records from all cellphone operators, including Grameenphone, Teletalk and Banglalink.
The ACC probe body verified the data and detected the anomalies, the ACC official said.
Calls from outside the country come through International Gateway at the international exchange and then reach different operators through two sub-exchanges at the Mohakhali office.
The accused manipulated international incoming calls through VoIP [Voice Over International Protocol], using the international exchange at Mohakhali.