DHAKA: A Bangladesh court ordered the arrest on Sunday of former chief justice Surendra Kumar Sinha and 10 others on charges they embezzled nearly half a million dollars, a prosecutor said.

“All of them are fugitives from justice,” prosecutor Khurshid Alam Khan said, adding Sinha was accused of embezzling money and laundering it from one bank account to another.

After accepting the charges, Judge K.M. Emrul Kayesh of the Senior Special Judges’ Court of Dhaka issued arrest warrants against all the accused as they have been named as fugitives in the charge sheet.

The court directed police to submit by Jan 22 reports on execution of the arrest warrants.

On Dec 10, the Anti-Corruption Commission (ACC) pressed charges against the 11 persons. The other accused include the Farmers Bank’s former MD A.K.M. Shamim, senior executive vice-president and former head of credit division Gazi Salahuddin, first vice-president of credit division Swapan Kumar Roy, first vice-president Shafiuddin Askary, former chairman of the bank’s audit committee Mahbubul Haque Chisty and vice-president Lutful Haque.

Surendra Sinha, who has left the country, and 10 others have been accused of embezzling half a million dollars

The Farmers Bank was later renamed Padma Bank.

The ACC in October last year said it found evidence of fraud involving two businessmen, Shahjahan and Niranjan. It said the money was deposited in Justice Sinha’s account.

Sinha headed the nation’s Supreme Court for a landmark verdict on judicial independence that went against the government, but fled Bangladesh in late 2017 amid allegations he had been forced to step aside.

Opposition groups and rights activists said the departure of Sinha, a Hindu, was a blow to the credibility of the judiciary in the Muslim-majority country.

Sinha, 68, now lives in North America. He was the first Hindu to be made chief justice of the officially secular nation of 168 million.

Sinha’s departure came after a rare statement from the Supreme Court in October 2017 said other judges had accused him of graft and refused to sit with him on the top bench.

Just months earlier, Sinha had led the Supreme Court in a decision that scrapped parliament’s power to sack top judges.

The ruling overturned a 2014 constitutional change introduced by authoritarian Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina.

In a written statement issued before he left the country, Sinha expressed dismay over criticism he had faced from the government over the ruling, saying he was “worried about the independence of the judiciary”.

He later wrote a book titled A Broken Dream: Rule of Law, Human Rights & Democracy, detailing the saga, saying he had been forced to resign and flee after being threatened by a military security agency.

Published in Dawn, January 6th, 2020