Bangladesh Bank Chief Puts a Price on the Bank Heist: Tk60,000 Crore a Year for Up to Eight Years

Bangladesh Bank Governor Md Mostaqur Rahman put a blunt price tag on the country's banking crisis over the weekend. Speaking Saturday at a Bangla QR promotional event in Dhaka, he said the government will need to set aside Tk60,000 crore every year, for five to eight years, just to rebuild the capital that has been drained from the banking system.

• Governor Mostaqur Rahman says banking sector recovery needs Tk60,000 crore a year from the national budget for five to eight years
• He says a third of the money in the system had already been stolen by the time he took charge
• Bangladesh Bank data show non performing loans reached Tk606,555 crore, or 32.78% of all outstanding credit, by the end of June 2026
• Industry trackers say that ratio is now the highest of any country tracked, ahead of war hit Ukraine

The governor did not soften the language. "When I took charge as governor, one third of the total funds in the banking system had already been stolen," he told the audience at United International University, where ONE Bank PLC had organised the event. He went further, rejecting the word theft altogether. "The plundering group looted public money," he said, adding that standard terms could not capture the scale of what had happened and that it amounted to outright plundering rather than simple embezzlement.

What Tk60,000 crore a year actually means

To make the number land, the governor offered two comparisons. The annual bill, he said, could instead have supported 2 crore families directly, or funded two mega infrastructure projects the size of the Padma Bridge, Bangladesh's largest and most expensive piece of public infrastructure. Multiplied across even the low end of his five year timeline, the total recovery cost would run to roughly Tk300,000 crore, a figure that rises closer to Tk480,000 crore if the rebuilding effort stretches the full eight years he mentioned.

That is public money, drawn from the same budget that pays for roads, schools, and subsidies, being redirected to patch holes left by what the governor describes as plundering rather than ordinary bad lending decisions. He said legal action is already under way against those responsible, aimed at both punishment and asset recovery, though he gave no timeline for when any of the stolen funds might actually be clawed back.

The bad loan numbers behind the governor's math

The governor's remarks landed against a backdrop of deteriorating asset quality that Bangladesh Bank's own figures lay out in stark detail. Non performing loans, the loans banks no longer expect to be repaid on schedule, stood at Tk606,555 crore at the end of June 2026, equal to 32.78% of all outstanding credit in the banking system, according to central bank data reported by Dhaka Tribune. That is up from Tk588,704 crore and a 32.26% ratio just three months earlier, and up by more than Tk76,000 crore from a year before.

Bankers and industry sources quoted separately say the jump partly reflects Bangladesh Bank's own tightened classification and provisioning rules, which have forced loans previously kept current through rescheduling or concessions into default categories for the first time. In other words, some of the bad debt was always there, just hidden by generous accounting. But sources also point to politically influenced lending, outright fraud, weak supervision, the broader economic slowdown, and an ongoing energy crisis as real drivers of fresh defaults, not just better bookkeeping catching up with old ones.

Separately, five banks currently undergoing merger have more than 80% of their loan books classified as non performing, while several state owned and private banks carry default ratios above 50%, according to the same reporting. Industry trackers now put Bangladesh's NPL ratio above that of Ukraine, a country at war, making it the highest tracked figure globally by at least one measure.

"The plundering group looted public money." , Md Mostaqur Rahman, Governor, Bangladesh Bank

Where the Tk60,000 crore fits against existing rescue spending

The figure is not entirely new territory for the budget. Bangladesh has already rolled out a Tk60,000 crore stimulus package this year, with roughly Tk41,000 crore of it sourced from the surplus liquidity sitting idle in the banking system rather than fresh budget allocation. Separately, the central bank has been injecting emergency liquidity into specific troubled lenders, including a package for National Bank meant to let depositors withdraw in full starting October 15, and refund schemes for customers of four collapsed non bank financial institutions.

What the governor is now describing is different in scale and duration: not a one off package or a liquidity bridge for a single lender, but a standing annual budget line running for the better part of a decade. Whether the finance ministry formally commits to that scale of recurring spending, amid its own revenue shortfalls and a tax to GDP ratio the governor himself put below 7%, is an open question the speech did not resolve.

What it means for you

For ordinary depositors and borrowers, the practical risk is less about the headline Tk60,000 crore figure and more about what competing claims on the budget could mean for interest rates, subsidies, and the pace of reform at individual banks. A banking system still absorbing a third lost to plundering, with NPLs still climbing past 32% of total credit, is one where deposit insurance, bank selection, and diversification matter more than usual. Savers comparing where to park fresh deposits can check current offers with BD Financial Review's FDR rate comparison tool before committing to a single lender, and anyone weighing a new loan against a shakier banking backdrop can model repayments with the EMI calculator.

For taxpayers, the governor's own framing is the clearest signal: money earmarked for recovering stolen bank capital is money that will not be available, in the near term, for the kind of direct family support or infrastructure spending he used as his comparison points.