Banks were considered ‘the best place to rob’

Ahsan H Mansur has said he never witnessed "any country where the highest level of the government, engineering with the help of some goons," managed "the systematic robbing of the banks".

"The highest level of political authority realized that the banks are the best place to rob," the Bangladesh Bank governor told The New York Times in an article titled "How a Country's Economy Was Siphoned Dry".

Bangladesh's currency was battered by what the new head of the central bank says was the looting of the banks under deposed prime minister Sheikh Hasina's Awami League government.

Mansur calculates that about $17 billion was siphoned from the country's financial system in the 15 years before the fall of the Hasina regime.

Using a web of financial schemes, Mansur said, the perpetrators in the government and at some of the country's biggest companies pulled off what was "effectively the largest bank heist in the history of money". "Whole boards were hijacked," said the governor.

Mansur, who took over the central bank in August, recounted what he had seen when he first surveyed the economy. "Everything was a disaster," he told the NYT. Now he says he is "cautiously optimistic" that things are being stabilised.

This "is not the year for economic growth," Mansur added. But inflation is coming down, and remittances are going up. "We have to be satisfied with that," he said.