Court Orders Media Circular against SK Sinha, 10 Others

A Dhaka court has ordered media circulars against former chief justice SK Sinha and 10 others concerning the arrest warrants against them for reportedly embezzling and laundering Tk 40 million from Farmers Bank (now Padma Bank).

Dhaka Senior Special Judge KM Imrul Kayes gave the order on Wednesday (Jan 22).

The order comes after the same court issued an arrest warrant against 11 people on Jan 5.

The other suspects are AKM Shamim, former Farmers Bank managing director, former SEVP Gazi Salauddin, first vice president Swapon Kumar Ray, former chief of the bank's appraisal committee Mahbubul Haque Chisthi, first vice president Shafiuddin Askary, vice president Md Lutful Haque, Tangail locals Md Shahjahan, Niranjan Chandra Saha, Ranjit Chandra Saha and his wife Shanti Ray.

The court dropped former senior vice president Md Ziauddin Ahmed from the case after his death.

The ACC noticed that both Niranjan Chandra Saha and M Shahjahan deposited Tk 20 million each into Sinha's Sonali Bank personal account, transferred from their deposits to the Gulshan Branch of Farmers Bank, by different pay orders in 2016.

The duo had collected the money with the aid of the accused bank officials through a loan from the same bank, which was handled unlawfully, and without due process.

Ranajit was allegedly a personal secretary of Sinha’s, and Ranajit and Shahjahan are childhood friends, the ACC found during its investigation.

What the accused committed is a scheduled offense under the Money Laundering Prevention Act, 2012, the case statement says.

The ACC launched an inquiry on April 25, 2018, following up on a complaint from an unknown source, who said Tk 40 million had been deposited in the bank account of former chief justice Sinha from two accounts of Farmers Bank.

The anti-graft watchdog interrogated Shahjahan and Niranjan in this regard, who said they had transferred the money to Sinha as part of the payment for a six-story building in Uttara, which he had sold to Tangail resident Santree in 2016, their lawyers told reporters on May 6, 2018.

ACC public relations official Pranab Kumar Bhattacharya confirmed then that Shahjahan and Niranjan had been interrogated from six hours at the ACC headquarters on May 7, 2018.

Four and a half months after he stepped down as the chief justice on Nov 10, 2017, in the wake of the uproar over the 16th constitutional amendment, the ACC opened the inquiry against Sinha.