Bangladesh says it will be able to recover the money stolen from its central bank’s account with the Federal Reserve Bank of New York within three years.
The statement comes two days after it sued Manila-based Rizal Commercial Banking Corp (RCBC) and accused it and dozens of others, including several top executives, of involvement in a "massive" and "intricately planned" multiyear conspiracy to steal its money.
“We can expect the stolen funds can be recovered within some three years,” Bangladesh Bank lawyer Ajmalul Hossain QC told the media in Dhaka on Sunday (Feb 3).
He said that the case accuses seven organizations including RCBC, 15 individuals and another 25 unidentified people.
“RCBC was behind the heist and it will be proven in court where the money went,” Hossain said.
On Jan 31, the Bangladesh Bank filed a case with U.S. District Court in Manhattan, where it alleged the funds were stolen with the help of unnamed North Korean hackers who used malwares to obtain backdoor access to its network.
The Philippines bank, however, called the lawsuit baseless and beyond jurisdiction.
RCBC's attorney, Tai-Heng Cheng of US law firm Quinn Emanuel Urquhart & Sullivan, called Bangladesh's lawsuit "completely baseless" and "nothing more than a thinly veiled PR campaign" to shift blame from itself, reports Reuters.
"Not only are the allegations false, they don't have the right to file here since none of the defendants are in the United States," he told the news agency.
Unidentified hackers pulled off the heist by breaching Bangladesh's systems and using the SWIFT global payments network to send fraudulent orders to the New York branch of the US central bank, which oversees the account and was tricked into releasing the funds.
Of nearly $1 billion requested, $81 million was sent to accounts at Manila-based bank Rizal Commercial Banking Corp (RCBC) and then mostly vanished into Philippines casinos.
So far, only $15 million of the stolen fund has been recovered.
Some 250 foreign central banks and governments keep more than $3 trillion of their assets at the New York Fed.