Home ›› 10 Apr 2023 ›› Stock
The Bangladesh Bank appointed a director on the board of Uttara Finance and Investments Ltd (UFIL).
The company said the central bank appointed an individual named Mohammad Ali as its director, as per a Dhaka Stock Exchange (DSE) filing on Sunday.
Earlier, in June last year, the cenbank removed UFIL’s the then managing director and chief executive officer SM Shamsul Arefin from his position due to his involvement in loan disbursement anomalies to some companies, particularly Monno Group.
Before, in early 2021, Uttara Finance hit headlines for loan irregularities involving about Tk 6,000 crore, putting depositors’ funds at risk.
The central bank had unearthed the company’s irregularities while inspecting its financial reports till 2020.
In 2021, the securities regulator, Bangladesh Securities and Exchange Commission dispatched auditors to Uttara Finance to investigate the financial statements of the errant non-bank financial institution.
The irregularities include lending money to the director’s company without due paperwork and paying huge amounts of cash to its chairman for no concrete reason.
Apart from these, the central bank also revealed other irregularities in 2022, such as creating fake loans to withdraw Tk 335 crore for Uttara Group and the managing director’s involvement in taking out money without any approval.
Uttara Finance’s loan disbursement till June 2022 stood at Tk 2,317 crore of which classified loans was Tk1,248 crore, 53.86 per cent of total loans.
