Under the guise of international trade, an average of 7.53 billion 37 million dollars or 80 thousand crore taka have been smuggled abroad from Bangladesh every year, according to Global Financial Integrity (GFI), a financial sector research organization based in Washington.

The organization says that every year an average of 80 thousand crore rupees has been smuggled from this small third world country! A large part of which is smuggled under the so-called ‘under the guise of international trade’.

Economists say that the main challenge now is to recover the laundered money anyway. They also said that for the past few years, the economy of the country has been under various tensions including dollar crisis, fragile economy, inflation, one of the reasons of which is money laundering. Lakhs of crores of rupees have been smuggled to different countries of the world in various ways including global trade manipulation, hundi, smuggling.

According to the Center for Policy Dialogue (CPD), more than 100 thousand crore rupees have been laundered in different countries of the world through only 24 loan scams embezzled in 19 banks of the country in the last one and a half years. Not only individual initiatives, several financial institutions of the country and public and private banks are also indirectly involved in the money laundering process.

Several years ago, Bangladesh signed several agreements with many countries to recover the money smuggled. Economists say that the current government can continue those agreements and joint ventures with related countries.

When asked about this, CPD Honorary Fellow Prof. Mostafizur Rahman said, “We have various agencies to recover the smuggled money.” We have several networks with foreign countries as well. So we have to use them too.