Awami League leaders, senior journalists and activists have condemned the UK-based Financial Times for its documentary on money laundering during Sheikh Hasina’s tenure for promoting lies using false statistics.
Many have alleged that the unconstitutional Yunus regime spent a lot of money to fund the production of the documentary, titled “Bangladesh’s Missing Billions, Stolen in Plain Sight,” as a sequel to the ones by BBC and Al Jazeera, when the interim government is under severe criticism for misrule, nepotism, corruption and state-sponsored mob violence.
Despite frantic efforts, in the last 13 months, the Yunus regime did not find any evidence of money laundering by Sheikh Hasina or her family members or former ministers. Rather, this is another attempt to hide the spree of corruption, irregularities and money laundering by Yunus, his advisers and the King’s party.
In a post on X, former state minister Mohammad Ali Arafat said on Saturday that the claim of $234 billion being siphoned off during the Awami League tenure is completely baseless.
He blamed the Financial Times for “making and broadcasting the propaganda documentary, which promotes Yunus’s lies and attacks Sheikh Hasina’s government.”
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He explained: “When the Awami League came to power in 2009, Bangladesh’s GDP was $93 billion. By 2024, it had risen to $450 billion. Over the past 15 years, the average growth rate has been 6–7%.
“But if, as Yunus claims, $234 billion had been siphoned off, then today the GDP would have been $684 billion—meaning the growth rate would have been 10–11% annually. That would imply that the World Bank and all international organizations had been publishing false statistics.”
Senior journalist Nobonita Chowdhury released a podcast on Friday, criticising the documentary, and questioned its content for failing to provide any concrete evidence of corruption and money laundering.
The allegation of $234 billion being siphoned off stems from the white paper prepared by a commission formed by the Yunus regime. The documentary contains interviews of Yunus and his men maligning the Awami League tenure, Sheikh Hasina’s family members and her close confidants.
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Nobonita said that former land minister Saifuzzaman Chowdhury inherited the real estate business in the UK from his industrialist father, Akhtaruzzaman Babu, who started business in London in 1962.
Since the fall of the Awami League government in August last year, the Yunus regime has produced the example of Saifuzzaman many times to allege that he had laundered a huge sum of money to buy over 300 flats in the UK.
The documentary does not mention the press conference by Saifuzzaman in 2024, when he challenged that he had not laundered money from Bangladesh and that he was willing to participate in a full investigation into how he acquired £200 million worth of UK property.
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Earlier, The Daily Star and Al Jazeera released special stories to allege money laundering by Saifuzzaman, who said that he had taken loans from banks, like Barclays, and financial institutions to buy flats.
By citing examples, Nobonita exposed false propaganda by the Yunus regime, while S Alam alleged that the regime was trying to malign the conglomerate using baseless and unfounded claims.
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