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Certainly one of Bangladesh’s richest businessmen has launched a authorized effort as a Singaporean citizen to get well losses he claims had been attributable to the Dhaka authorities freezing his property and harming his investments following the ousting of former prime minister Sheikh Hasina.
The motion by Mohammed Saiful Alam, founder and chair of Bangladeshi industrial conglomerate S Alam, and his household may threaten the interim authorities’s makes an attempt to claw again billions of {dollars} it claims had been diverted in a foreign country underneath the earlier regime.
In a discover of dispute letter despatched to Bangladesh’s caretaker chief Muhammad Yunus and a number of other of his closest advisers, Alam’s legal professionals state that except the 2 sides can resolve the dispute inside six months they are going to start worldwide arbitration.
The legal professionals are making the case underneath a 2004 bilateral funding treaty between Bangladesh and Singapore, the place the S Alam household are based mostly.
The December 18 letter states that the household obtained everlasting residence in Singapore in 2011 and citizenship between 2021 and 2023. It provides that all of them renounced their Bangladeshi nationality in 2020.
The letter, despatched by legal professionals Quinn Emanuel Urquhart & Sullivan and seen by the Monetary Occasions, alleges that the Alam household’s financial institution accounts have been frozen and so they have been subjected to journey bans and misplaced management of their corporations, whereas additionally being investigated by state our bodies over potential cash laundering with out official discover.
It states that banks owned by S Alam have been restricted from lending and had their administration groups modified, whereas offers that they had in place have been cancelled by the federal government “arbitrarily and with out due course of”.
“The worth of the traders’ investments has been destroyed, in entire or partly, via the acts and omissions of Bangladesh, its businesses and instrumentalities,” the Quinn Emanuel letter states.
“These acts and omissions, that are ongoing, have violated and proceed to violate the traders’ rights underneath [investment treaties] and the legal guidelines of Bangladesh, and provides rise to the current dispute.”
The Bangladesh authorities didn’t reply to a request for touch upon the letter.
Ahsan Mansur, who was appointed Bangladesh’s central financial institution governor following the toppling of Sheikh Hasina’s regime in August, instructed the FT in October that Saiful Alam, his associates and different teams had siphoned cash out of the banking system after taking up main banks with the assistance of members of a robust navy intelligence company.
Mansur, a former IMF official, alleged that they used strategies comparable to loans to the banks’ new shareholders and inflated import invoices as a part of what he referred to as the “greatest, highest robbing of banks by any worldwide requirements”.
S Alam group, which has pursuits in sectors together with meals, development, clothes, and banking, has stated there’s “no reality” to Mansur’s allegations.
A spokesperson for Bangladesh’s central financial institution stated: “The problems are in investigation and the central financial institution is refrained from any remark for the betterment of the investigation outcomes.”
Alam’s letter is an early indicator of the hurdles Bangladesh’s interim authorities faces in its makes an attempt to reclaim cash it says was taken out of the banking system underneath the regime of Sheikh Hasina.
Individually, Tulip Siddiq, a UK Treasury minister who’s Sheikh Hasina’s niece, was named this week in a Bangladesh Excessive Court docket corruption declare that accused her household of embezzling $5bn.
Siddiq has declined to remark publicly, however a spokesperson for the UK authorities stated she had denied “any involvement within the allegations”.
Further reporting by Krishn Kaushik in New Delhi
