Bashundhara accused of grabbing Tk 1.5 tr land

Probing money laundering charges: CID

Staff Correspondent: CID, the police’s criminal investigation agency, has decided to investigate against Bashundhara Group’sChairman Ahmed Akbar Sobhan and his son and Managing Director Sayem Sobhan Anveer, who have facing complaints of land grabbing and money laundering, the country’s largest housing company. This information was given in a notification yesterday.
It has been reported that various organizations related to the interests of Bashundhara Group have been accused of fraud, forgery, duty and VAT evasion, under-invoicing and over-invoicing and embezzling thousands of crores of taka.
The CID also wrote that while part of the land proposed for the Bashundhara residential project had the approval of Rajuk, most of it was done without Rajuk approval.
“With power and money, public and government canals, beels, rivers, khas lands, waste lands, graveyards, slaughterhouses have been occupied by filling up soil and make housing projects, the CID sources told Daily Industry.”
The Bashundhara group resorted to various forms of fraud and fraud to take possession of the land, the CID wrote, “To illegally occupy a total of 116 acres of land including 800 acres (2,400 bighas) of the Government’s Khas, Nal, River and 216 acres of Bhawal Raja’s Estate in the Bashundhara residential area. There are so many allegations are against the Bashundhara group,” CID sources added.
“The value of these properties is estimated to be more than Tk one and a half lakh crore (Tk 1.5 trillion),” the CID wrote about receiving complaints of East West Properties Limited’s encroachment of huge amounts of land in various blocks of Bashundhara residential area.
It is also written in the notice that there are allegations of taking hundreds of crores of taka in one-time advance and installments by selling plots to various professionals by illegally occupying and filling land for the Bashundhara Riverview project without Rajuk approval.
Citing various sources, the CID says that the Bashundhara Group has taken a loan of more than Tk 42,000 crore from the various Scheduled Banks of the country without keeping sufficient security and resorting to ‘deceit and fraud’.
The CID has also written that most of these funds have been siphoned in various countries including Dubai, Singapore, Cyprus, London, Malaysia.
According to the notification, Shah Alam’s elder son Sadat Sobhan Tanveer is looking after Bashundhara Group’s Singapore office. There is an allegation against him that he has taken loans of thousands of crores of taka from different banks showing one project after another but not repaying those loans.
The CID says that the import of bitumen of Tk 2,000 crores against a company called Bashundhara Oil and Gas (Keraniganj, Dhaka) under the guise of ‘trade based’ money laundering, is supplied to different parts of Bangladesh through a monopoly under the control of a powerful syndicate,” the CID sources added.
Sayem Sobhan Tanveer, managing director of Bashundhara Group, was mentioned as one of the ‘controllers of the gold smuggling syndicate’, the circular said, “Through this syndicate, there are often reports of destabilizing the gold market by creating an artificial crisis in the country at various times.”