Bangladesh Bank Headquarters
Dhaka, Bangladesh (BBN)– The central bank of Bangladesh has sought information on overdue import bills up to December 31 last from the commercial banks by January 13, officials said.
The Bangladesh Bank (BB), the country’s central bank, took the move against the backdrop of rising trend in the amount of non-payment of import bills recently.
Currently, the amount of such bills stood at around US$ 600 million, they added.
Talking to the BBN, a BB senior official said the central bank has sent letters to all foreign exchange dealer banks in this connection with a prescribed format to get the information immediately.
“We’ll take the next course of action after receiving the information from the banks,” he added.
There have been allegations in the recent times that the authorised dealer (AD) branches do not settle import payment bills within the maturity date despite giving acceptance, which is unfortunate, the BB said in its letter.
“We’ll verify the information, provided by the banks concerned, with its ‘dashboard’ electronic system,” another BB official said.
The central bank earlier launched the system for monitoring all kinds of foreign exchange transactions, aiming to check fraud and forgery in the country’s banking sector.
‘Dashboard’ provides summary of export, import, inland back-to-back letters of credit (LCs), and inward-outward remittance transactions with categorically separated details.
BBN/SSR/AD
