In an interview with the Financial Times, Bangladesh Bank governor Ahsan Mansur accused powerful business tycoons of siphoning off $ 17 billion from the banking sector of the country during the 15-year rule of the ousted prime minister Sheikh Hasina.

He alleged that members of the Directorate General of Forces Intelligence, the country’s military intelligence agency, facilitated the takeover of major banks, which led to the systematic transfer of funds out of Bangladesh.

According to Mansur, around Tk 2 lakh crore or $16.7 billion was extracted through methods such as loans to new shareholders and inflated import invoices, reports Financial Times.

This was the biggest robbing of banks by any international standards, said Mansur. He asserted that the state-sponsored nature of the fraud would not have been possible without intelligence officials pressuring bank CEOs into compliance.

The governor specifically named Mohammed Saiful Alam, the founder and chairman of the industrial conglomerate S Alam Group, as being deeply involved in the scheme, claiming that at least $10 billion was ‘siphoned off’ from the banking system with the assistance of DGFI.

‘Every day they were granting loans to themselves,’ Mansur noted.

However, the S Alam Group, through law firm Quinn Emanuel Urquhart & Sullivan, denied the allegations, calling them unfounded. The group’s statement described the interim government’s campaign against several leading businesses as a violation of due process, which undermined investor confidence and law and order in Bangladesh.

Sheikh Hasina fled to India on August 5. Her tenure was plagued with accusations of vote rigging, opposition repression and widespread corruption. The interim government, now led by Nobel laureate Muhammad Yunus, has vowed to retrieve the funds that were allegedly misappropriated under her administration, the report said.

Mansur disclosed that he had sought international assistance, including from the UK, to investigate the overseas assets of Sheikh Hasina’s associates. He recounted that during her regime, intelligence officials forced bank board members to sell their shares to Saiful Alam at gunpoint. They ‘hijacked’ board members from their houses, he said, adding that one bank after another underwent the same coercive takeovers, added the report.