It all began with a name that never existed.
In June this year, a Public Works Department (PWD) officer reviewing procurement documents found two bidders – both having same name, same directors, same parent conglomerate, and even same physical footprint in Dhaka. One was real while the other existed only inside Bangladesh’s e-GP procurement system. Both belonged to PRAN-RFL Group.
That began to expose a pattern of a bigger fraudulence and that has been carefully done by using two different spellings of one word “limited” and “Ltd”.
An investigation by TIMES of Bangladesh reveals that PRAN-RFL Group operated what procurement experts describe as a shadow tender network built on duplicate corporate identities, conflicting tax records, and bid submissions from entity, not existing in any official registry.
The ploy allowed Bangladesh’s largest conglomerate to compete against itself, bypass genuine competition, and accumulate 596 work orders worth Tk2,384 crore over the past decade.
With food processing, plastics, light engineering, electronics and exports among others, the group plays a significant role in the rural economy by sourcing agricultural produce from thousands of farmers and maintaining an extensive manufacturing and distribution network. Annual turnover of the group, having around 1.5 lakh workforce, is estimated at about Tk36,000 crore.
Against this rosy picture of creating massive employment and contribution to the economy, the evidence found by this news outlet tells a different story.
Documents, e-GP datasets, Registrar of Joint Stock Companies and Firms (RJSC) records, National Board of Revenue (NBR) filings, and interviews with procurement insiders point to a deliberate, systematic structure that mirrors patterns seen in major procurement-fraud cases in many countries, including Brazil, South Africa and India.
At the heart of this structure is one “company” that appears highly active inside the government’s digital procurement platform but entirely missing out everywhere. The entity, Rangpur Metal Industries Limited, has been awarded Tk305.3 crore of government contracts since 2016.
According to RJSC records, no such company exists. The company that exists is Rangpur Metal Industries Ltd, which is legally registered under PRAN-RFL.
The distinction between Limited and Ltd is insignificant on paper but very useful in business.
Inside e-GP, the “Limited” maintains its own vendor profile, tender history, and a list of contract awards despite having no incorporation records, no authorised signatory, and no tax identity that matches its name.
TIMES found that the BIN used by Rangpur Metal Industries Limited in tenders belongs to the legally registered “Ltd” version. This allowed the fake entity to function by borrowing the tax credentials of the real company–an identity collision that procurement experts say nearly impossible in a verified digital tendering system.
Tax specialists reviewing the documents described the arrangement as “structurally incompatible with VAT compliance,” since a non-existent company cannot file VAT returns under its own name and any payments made through the borrowed BIN would be indistinguishable inside NBR’s system.
A comprehensive review of tender data shows that PRAN-RFL’s procurement presence was not confined to two entities. A third subsidiary, Property Development Ltd, also operated alongside the others, giving the conglomerate three separate bidding identities to repeatedly appear in the same tenders. Together, the trio secured 596 work orders of different government departments from 2015 to November 2025.
In many competitions, tender sheets showed multiple bids positioned PRAN-RFL firms among the top–an arrangement that procurement analysts describe as “artificial competition,” where the illusion of multiple bidders masks the dominance of a single corporate actor.
The pattern becomes even clearer in live tenders. On September 7, Bangladesh Maritime University called two bids for four elevator installations. Among the bidders were Property Development Ltd and Rangpur Metal Industries Limited – the real subsidiary and the phantom one. Both are owned by PRAN-RFL Chairman Ahsan Khan Chowdhury.
In these two bids, both appeared within the top six price slots – one as the second-highest bidder and the other in sixth place.
The Public Procurement Act 2006 and the Public Procurement Rules 2008 explicitly prohibit multiple bids from entities under the same ownership, yet these submissions were accepted for nearly a decade. This confirms that the phantom entity was active in recent months.
Competition was further suppressed through an unusually high volume of single-bid tenders. One-third of all work orders secured by the three PRAN-RFL entities involved no competing bidder at all – nearly double the national average of 18 percent.
For Property Development Ltd, the numbers were even more extreme: out of 376 contracts over ten years, 59 percent were single-bid tenders. In 2025 alone, the company secured Tk637.6 crore – representing 96 percent of its total decade-long volume.
Transparency International Bangladesh (TIB) Executive Director Iftekharuzzaman, after reviewing TIMES’ findings, said the bidding pattern “raises serious concerns of deliberate design,” noting that the use of multiple entities – including one that does not legally exist – goes far beyond procedural lapses.
“By bidding through multiple entities, PRAN-RFL clearly violated the laws. Such a company must be held accountable – no matter how powerful,” he added.
Iftekharuzzaman further said that accountability must go beyond the company. “Those within government enabled this corruption must also face legal action.”
Tax trail of the group also revealed its own anomalies. Contracts awarded to the phantom Rangpur Metal Industries Limited amount to Tk305.3 crore, implying a VAT obligation of roughly Tk30.5 crore. Since the company does not exist in corporate records, the VAT corresponding to these contracts cannot be filed or traced under that identity.
Since the BIN attached to the tenders belongs to a different entity, the VAT payments – if made – would merge indistinguishably into the filings of the real company [Ltd], creating what tax lawyers describe as a “VAT-masking mechanism.”
If NBR applies the standard penalty matrix under the VAT and Supplementary Duty Act – 100 percent penalty for unpaid tax and one percent monthly interest – the potential liability rises to approximately Tk76 crore.
Tax lawyer AG Mahmud, who reviewed the documents and findings, said the configuration “creates conditions in which VAT obligations become effectively untraceable,” adding that a non-existent entity using the BIN of a registered company “is precisely the kind of structural irregularity that exposes both the filer [NBR] and the beneficiary [PRAN-RFL] to prosecution under the law.”
Despite these fraudulence and corruptions, no regulator intervened until June, when a Public Works Department engineer, Niaz Md Tanvir Alam, formally notified the Bangladesh Public Procurement Authority’s (BPPA) review panel.
Alam wrote that the two companies had been submitting bids and receiving work orders using separate accounts since 2016 even though only one existed in RJSC records. “This is forgery,” he wrote.
In a telephonic conversation, Alam said he had no idea whether the authorities initiated investigation into it. “I documented what I found out.”
Responding to this reporter, Chief Executive Officer of BPPA SM Moin Uddin Ahmed said the allegations “cannot be ignored,” and that action would follow once the review panel completes its examination. However, he did not comment on why the duplicate identity persisted inside e-GP for nearly a decade.
For nearly ten years, automated checks inside e-GP did not block a company that did not legally exist. RJSC did not detect a dual-name mismatch tied to one of the country’s largest conglomerates. NBR did not question VAT filings associated with incompatible identities.
Moreover, procuring entities accepted bids from companies that could not be found in corporate registries. And even after a whistleblower flagged the issue in June, the dual-bidding structure continued.
This news outlet sent PRAN-RFL a questionnaire outlining all the findings. In a written reply, the company denied doing anything wrong.
PRAN-RFL said the two names – Rangpur Metal Industries Ltd and Limited – refer to the same company, created during the transition from manual to digital records, and that both e-GP profiles are legitimate and registered under a single BIN. It denied submitting multiple bids in the same tender, asserted that all VAT was duly paid, and dismissed the forgery allegation as “entirely false.” The group added that single-bid awards merely reflect market participation, not manipulation, and insisted that no rules were violated.
But TIMES investigation and the documents gathered show that the group’s fraudulent practice continued for years.
