A court in Bangladesh denied bail on Thursday to the former head of the country’s capital markets regulator, who is accused of money laundering and receiving $361,000 in bribes.
Police arrested Shibli Rubayat ul Islam, the ex-chair of the Bangladesh Securities and Exchange Commission, on Tuesday. A court in the capital, Dhaka, has now ordered him to remain in jail to face further questioning.
“The allegations made against him in the case file are baseless,” said Rubayat ul Islam’s lawyer, Borhan Uddin.
“The money for which the case has been filed against him is not illegal money. There has been no money laundering here,” he told OCCRP and Netra News.
However, corruption accusations against Rubayat ul Islam have been stewing for years.
Bangladesh’s Anti-Corruption Commission (ACC) received a complaint in 2021 alleging that Rubayat ul Islam had received payments from a bank account connected to a multi-million-dollar fraud, OCCRP has reported. The ACC did not act on the complaint at the time.
The ACC was widely considered ineffective and subject to political influence under the government of former Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina, who was forced out of office in August 2024 by mass protests after more than 15 years in power.
Estimates of the amount of public money lost to corruption under her tenure reportedly range from $17 billion to $30 billion. The blatant theft of public funds fuelled outrage in a country with almost 19 percent of its 173 million people living in poverty, according to the World Bank.
Rubayat ul Islam resigned from Securities and Exchange Commission days after Hasina’s government fell.
His arrest came in the midst of a corruption crackdown by Bangladesh’s new government, which has reconstituted the ACC and appointed Hafiz Ahsan Farid, a retired Brigadier General, as a commissioner of inquiry.
Farid said the ACC is continuing to investigate Rubayat ul Islam, including the findings of OCCRP’s 2023 reporting, but added that the body already had enough evidence to file a criminal case against him.
“The ACC does not move forward without preliminary evidence,” Farid told Netra News.
Rubayat ul Islam has not been charged. The allegations against him include those reported by OCCRP, which involve claims by a Hong Kong-based company called Ming Global that it was defrauded out of more than $13 million.
As part of the scheme, Rubayat ul Islam allegedly received over $800,000 wired to his personal account. His lawyer told OCCRP in 2023 that the transfers were legitimate rent payments.
In an attempt to retrieve the money it allegedly lost to the scam, Ming Global hired IFW Global, a firm headquartered in Australia that specializes in investigations and asset recovery.
IFW Global said it investigated the case and lodged a complaint with the ACC in July 2021.
“Unfortunately, under the previous government, the ACC declined to pursue the case,” Ken Gamble, director of IFW Global, told OCCRP.
“The decision to bring the matter before the courts under the current administration is a positive development, demonstrating a renewed commitment to tackling corruption at the highest levels,” he added.