EDITORIAL
Finance minister says it all
Through this statement of his, the finance minister just confirmed what was already known, and the reason this was known is because it couldn't have been based on any logical reasoning. After all, the other private banks that had similarly been given licences based on political considerations a few years back have already failed to perform. And not only that, allegations of money laundering through some of these banks were also brought forth a number of times only to be ignored by the concerned authorities.
As one Bangladesh Bank official said in a report previously published by this newspaper, the central bank could not completely monitor these banks as they were owned by politically influential people—despite some of them being linked to loan scams, aggressive lending and violations of banking regulations among other issues, posing serious threats to the banking sector according to the central bank's own assessment.
Given that members of the ruling party also have very close ties with three out of the four new banks, can we really expect them to perform any differently once operational?
Why then is the central bank going ahead with issuing licences to them? And why is the finance minister, knowing all this, not intervening? Have we not seen him or his ministry intervene with matters concerning the central bank before, even when experts pleaded him not to? Is the finance minister really this helpless to intervene in affairs concerning the nation's financial sector, which is already reeling from being hit with one scam after another?
If that is the case then who really is running our financial sector? The people deserve to know.
In either case, we once again reiterate our call to whoever is in charge of our banking sector, to learn from past mistakes, and to refrain from issuing licences to new banks based on political considerations as that can only push the sector further and quicker towards a major debacle.
- Courtesy: The Daily Star/ Nov 05, 2018
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