Bangladesh will file a lawsuit in the US court seeking damages over the 2016 reserve heist of its central bank before the deadline according to the international laws, said an official.
“We have completed the process and will file the lawsuit before the deadline. We will not wait for the last moment, that is Feb 3,” Abu Hena Mohd Razee Hassan, the chief of Bangladesh Bank’s Financial Intelligence Unit, told Bangla Tribune on Tuesday (Jan 15).
A government delegation led by Md. Ashadul Islam, secretary to the Financial Institutions Division of the finance ministry is now in New York for talks to try and move forward the recovery process.
Bangladesh Bank has appointed two law firms in the US and officials have locked on a decision on suing the parties involved.
Speaking to Bangla Tribune, Hasan, who returned from New York on Monday (Jan 14), said they were hopeful of recovering the stolen money through the lawsuit.
“The issue of Philippine jailing a former RCBC official and North Korean hacker Park Jin Hyok’s involvement will be featured in the lawsuit,” he said.
On Thursday (Jan 10), a court in the Philippines found a former RCBC branch manager Maia Deguito guilty on eight counts of money laundering and sentenced her to a jail term ranging from 32 to 56 years, with each count carrying four to seven years.
In September 2018, the US government alleged in a court complaint that a North Korean hacker was behind breaking into the Bangladesh Bank’s system.
Park Jin Hyok worked as part of a team of hackers, also known as the Lazarus Group, to try to breach multiple other US businesses, according to the complaint filed in the US court.
According to people familiar with the process, Bangladesh will sue RCBC in the US court recover the stolen reserve.
In a letter to Bangladesh Bank governor in November, the Federal Reserve Bank of New York (NY Fed) has assured of all-out cooperation in recovering the money, they said.
In the audacious bank heist in February 2016, hackers tried to swindle $100 million belonging to Bangladesh from the NY Fed using forged commands through the SWIFT messaging system.
The hackers siphoned off $81 million to accounts in the Philippines using five messages. Another $20 million was wired to Sri Lanka.
Though the Sri Lankan transfer was stopped successfully, the fund wired to the Philippines made its way to gambling dens, making it impossible to be recovered.
Bangladesh has been able to retrieve only about $15 million, mostly from a casino junket operator.
Another $17 million has been traced to money remittance company Philrem. The Anti-Money Laundering Council in the Philippines has confiscated the fund and a lawsuit is ongoing.
A further $29 million has been traced to Casino Solaire, now frozen by the Philippines court in a pending case. The remaining $14 million is yet to be traced.
People in Bangladesh could learn about the largest cyber heist in the world through reports published in a Filipino newspaper a month after the incident.
The heist cost the then-Governor Atiur Rahman his job after he drew flak for keeping the theft under wraps. It was followed by a major overhaul of the top brass of Bangladesh’s central bank.
The Bangladesh government had commissioned a probe led by former central bank governor Mohammed Farashuddin, which filed its findings in May 2016.
The government, however, has not made it public as well as turned down Philippines’ RCBC bank’s request to share the findings with them.