The Anti-Corruption Commission (ACC) has decided to file a case against Bangladesh Telecommunication Regulatory Commission’s (BTRC) former chairman Sunil Kanti Bose and five others for wasting the Tk9000 crore belonging to the state by misusing power.
The anti-graft watchdog issued a statement in this regard on Wednesday.
The other accused are former BTRC chairman Shahjahan Mahmud, former vice chairman Brig Gen (Retd) Ahsan Habib Khan, and former commissioners Zahurul Haque, Rezaul Kader and Aminul Hasan.
According to the statement, the accused helped International Gateway (IGW) operators receive financial benefits between October 2015 to January 2018 by bending government rules and regulations.
“With the dishonest intention of financially benefiting themselves and the IGW operators, they abused their power to unlawfully maintain – beyond the one-year temporary and experimental period from 18 September 2014 to 30 September 2015 – the reduced international incoming call termination rate for IGW operators at $0.015 per call-minute instead of the fixed $0.03,” the statement reads.
It also said that, instead of the government’s revenue-sharing rate of 51.75 per cent, they kept it at 40 per cent, and instead of the IGW operators’ revenue-sharing rate of 13.25 per cent, they kept it at 20 per cent. These reduced rates were illegally continued for a total of 28 months, from October 2015 to January 2018, after the completion of the said one-year experimental period.
ACC said that, as a result, the state faced a total financial loss of Tk9,010.74 crore.
ACC has approved to file a case against them under Sections 409 and 418 of the Penal Code, Section 5(2) of the Prevention of Corruption Act, 1947, and Sections 4(2) and 4(3) of the Money Laundering Prevention Act, 2012.
