Money laundering goes on under cover of foreign trade

 
In one of the biggest money laundering scams unearthed so far in the country, customs authorities have found that 33 readymade garment factories and buying houses laundered at least Tk 821 crore over the last six years.

For the illicit money transfer, the fraudsters employed two tactics - under invoicing and using wrong shipping code. In the first case, prices were shown up to 10 times lower than the actual rate. In the second case, shipments were shown as "samples" when they were actually exports worth hundreds of crores of taka.

"Multiple gangs are involved here. We have found links of many powerful organizations and individuals at home and abroad. A case will be filed against them very soon," a Chattogram customs official told reporters recently on condition of anonymity.

Documents show Dhaka-based buying house Asia Trading Corporation shipped 14,085 tons of clothing items worth Tk 308 crore ($28 million) to the UAE, Singapore and Malaysia in 2022. However, not even a single dollar entered the country against this shipment.

In the shipping documents, the company showed all the 1,342 consignments as "sample goods". Under customs rules, sample goods do not fetch any export earnings.

Similarly, Hong Kong Fashion, an export-oriented company based in Gazipur, exported 1,160 tons of RMG goods worth Tk 43.21 crore to seven countries including the UAE, Canada and Malaysia between January 2022 and May 2023. Only Tk 12.73 crore has been brought back to the country against these shipments, while the remaining Tk 30.48 crore was laundered, according to the customs probe report.