Tk4 Crore Bribery Scandal at Commerce Bank Exposes Deeper Rot in Bangladesh's Banking Sector

A Scheme Hidden Behind an Ordinary Word

On paper, it looked like an ordinary line item. Bangladesh Commerce Bank had just landed a plum Tk100 crore fixed deposit from the Gazipur City Corporation at a modest 2.5 percent interest rate, the kind of low cost, high value deposit every commercial bank in the country competes hard for. Somewhere in the process of winning that account, Tk4 crore was quietly credited into the personal bank accounts of bank employees, booked internally as "hospitality expenses" and, separately, as incentive payments tied to the bank's Ujjibon deposit mobilisation drive. There was no board approval for any of it. According to a central bank inspection report, the money moved fast once it landed. On June 7, Tk3.04 crore was pulled out and physically carried, reportedly in sacks, to the Uttara Club in Dhaka. A day later, Tk96 lakh followed the same route to the Gulshan Club. All of it was withdrawn through fourteen cheques processed at the bank's principal branch.

Bangladesh Bank did not mince words when it finally moved on the case in a directive dated August 25, giving the bank one month to report back on disciplinary action. Regulators described the arrangement plainly: deposits were collected from clients at lower rates while officials told the client, and recorded internally, that a higher rate had been offered, then pocketed the difference as unauthorised cash incentives. "There is no scope for providing any incentive for collecting deposits," the central bank said, adding that the practice amounted to a violation serious enough to fall under the Money Laundering Prevention Act.

Two Dismissals, Eleven Warnings

Thirteen officials in total have been named in the central bank's order, spread across the bank's head office, its principal branch and its Dilkusha branch. Two face the harshest consequence available, outright dismissal: Md Delwar Hossain, senior executive vice president and head of the treasury department, and Md Hamidur Rahman, senior principal officer and secretary to the managing director. The remaining eleven, ranging from first assistant vice presidents down to officers, have been ordered to face what Bangladesh Bank calls the highest available administrative action short of termination.

Delwar Hossain's file makes the case harder to write off as an isolated lapse. Before joining Bangladesh Commerce Bank, he was dismissed from NRBC Bank over separate irregularities, and he is currently named in a pending Anti Corruption Commission case involving an alleged Tk74 crore embezzlement, alongside allegations of trade based money laundering. That a banker with that history was sitting atop a treasury department at all is now, itself, part of the story regulators and industry watchers are asking questions about. It points to a gap not just in one bank's internal controls but in how the sector screens and tracks people once they have already been flagged elsewhere.

A Scandal That Lands at the Worst Possible Moment

The timing matters. Bangladesh Bank's own figures show non performing loans across the banking system reached Tk6.06 lakh crore by the end of June 2026, equal to 32.78 percent of all outstanding credit, a record high and a sharp jump from the 32.26 percent, or Tk5,88,704 crore, recorded just three months earlier in March. Just ten banks now account for more than 72 percent of that pile. Bangladesh Bank has responded on the policy side with a longer rescheduling window for large defaulters and, only days before the Commerce Bank case became public, a new requirement that loans above one crore taka be independently valued by one of 131 newly enlisted valuation firms before disbursement, aimed at stopping borrowers from inflating collateral to unlock bigger loans than their assets justify.

Bankers and researchers who study the sector argue that cases like the one at Commerce Bank are not a side issue to the bad loan crisis, they are close to its root cause. Syed Mahbubur Rahman, managing director and chief executive of Mutual Trust Bank, has been blunt about what he sees industry wide: "One of the biggest concerns is that a large portion of the banking sector's NPLs may effectively be unrecoverable," he said, pointing to years of regulatory leniency, relaxed down payment rules and generous rescheduling that let weak loans sit on the books looking healthier than they were. He calls the accounting leniency the banking sector was granted through past years "the worst thing that has happened" to the sector's credibility.

Md Ezazul Islam, director general of the Bangladesh Institute of Bank Management, traces the deeper pattern back further, to episodes like the 2017 takeover controversy at Islami Bank Bangladesh, which he and other bankers describe as something close to a final blow to sector discipline. It cemented a perception, he argues, that political connection could substitute for creditworthiness. "Banks should lend based on a borrower's cash flow, not reputation, influence or collateral alone," Islam said, adding that fixing the sector now requires "the political will to enforce the rules consistently," not just new paperwork requirements. Humaira Azam, managing director and chief executive of LankaBangla Finance, put the frustration in blunter, more visible terms: major defaulters, she said, can be seen "roaming around, throwing lavish wedding parties," while depositors and honest borrowers absorb the cost of a system that rarely makes bad actors pay a real price.

The Numbers Behind the Rot

Seen side by side, the trend in bad loans shows how quickly the picture has deteriorated even within a single year, and why regulators are under pressure to show that enforcement against individuals, not just new rules on paper, is actually happening.

Period	Non performing loans	NPL ratio
March 2026	Tk 5,88,704 crore	32.26%
June 2026	Tk 6,06,555 crore	32.78%

What Happens Next

Bangladesh Commerce Bank now has until late September to report back to the central bank on how it has carried out the disciplinary actions, a deadline that will offer an early signal of whether the sanctions announced on paper translate into anything real. For a banking sector still absorbing the shock of a record bad loan ratio, and still working through a separate program to verify inflated collateral across the system, this case is a small but telling test case. If a bank can be caught diverting client deposit incentives into personal accounts, move the cash to private clubs within days, and still take a central bank inspection and a formal order before facing consequences, it suggests the enforcement gap Bangladesh Bank is trying to close runs deeper than any single directive can fix. Industry figures interviewed across recent reporting on the crisis converge on largely the same point: rules already exist on paper. What has been missing, they say, is the consistent will to apply them regardless of who is implicated.

A Trust Problem the Sector Cannot Paper Over

Cases like this compound a trust problem the banking sector was already fighting on multiple fronts. Just weeks earlier, Sammilito Islami Bank had to open its doors to depositors after Bangladesh Bank capped withdrawal payouts at Tk5,000 crore, with 74,221 customers claiming Tk3,925 crore in the first four working days alone before daily demand began to cool. That episode had nothing to do with the Commerce Bank case directly, but it illustrates the same underlying dynamic analysts keep pointing to: once depositors sense that a bank's internal controls cannot be trusted, even solvent institutions can face a run on confidence rather than a run on solvency. For Bangladesh Bank, cases like the Commerce Bank scandal are not just about punishing 13 individuals, they are about demonstrating to millions of depositors that oversight actually works, at a moment when the sector can least afford another crisis of confidence.