Police foil Shibir’s processions in capital city

Police foiled several processions brought out by Islami Chhatra Shibir men in city’s Motijheel, Shyamoli and Agargaon areas on Tuesday, reports UNB.

In Motijheel, Shibir activists brought out a sudden procession from Shapla Chattar at about 9:00 am. When the procession reached near Ittefaq intersection police tried to obstruct them.
Being obstructed by police, the Shibir activists attacked the law enforcers with brickbats. Police charged batons and fired several rounds of rubber bullets to disperse them. Several crude bombs were also blasted during the clash but none was hurt.
Meanwhile, Shibir men brought out processions at Shyamoli and Agargaon areas at about 11:00 am. Police charged batons and fired rubber bullets to foil the two processions. Sher-e-Banglanagar thana police detained several persons from the two spots.

S’pore court orders Koko’s firm to return Tk 8cr laundered by him

Dhaka : A Singapore court on Tuesday directed a consulting firm of the country to return to Bangladesh Tk 8 cr (US $ 9.32 million) siphoned off by BNP chairperson Khaleda Zia’s younger son Arafat Rahman Koko, reports UNB.
Attorney General Mahbubey Alam appeared for the Bangladesh government at the Court No 10 of Singapore which ordered the laundered money back. The court order came following a case filed with it by Bangladesh’s ACC three years ago.
The court sources said Koko laundered the money to Singapore in 2004-2006 and deposited it with Fairhill Consulting Limited, a firm set up in the Southeast Asian country by Koko when the BNP-led four-party alliance was in power in 2001-2006. He deposited the money with the help of a Singaporean citizen, the sources said. This is the second money laundering case in which the Bangladesh government has got the verdict in its favour.
In November last year, the ACC brought back around 20.41 lakh Singapore dollars (Tk 13 crore) laundered by Koko and his associate. Then the money was transferred to Sonali Bank’s Ramna corporate branch from Singapore on Nov 23, ACC sources said. In 2011, the ACC opened an account titled, ‘Stolen Asset Recovery Account’ with Sonali Bank to receive the amount.
The money was deposited in Singapore by Koko and Ismail Hossain Saimon, son of former BNP minister late Akbar Hossain. The returned money would be spent on anti-graft activities, they added. This was the first money-laundering case in which the government could recover the money. ACC Deputy Director Abu Syeed on March 17, 2009 sued Koko and Saimon for laundering more than Tk 20 crore – Singapore $ 28,84,603.15 and US $ 9,32,672.81 between 2004-07.
Koko had received the amount from the Chinese company Siemens and from Habibur Rahman, a Bangladeshi living in Dubai. The anti-graft body recovered the amount that Habib had sent to Fairhill Consulting’s account at Singapore Overseas Bank from Janata Bank’s Dubai branch between 2004 and 2007.
An ACC probe found Koko was the owner of Fairhill. In the case, the ACC pinpoints Koko’s dealings with China Harbour Engineering Company Ltd for constructing the New Mooring Container Terminal and with Siemens for supplying and setting up equipment for Teletalk mobile phone company. Trying him in absentia, a Dhaka court on June 23 in 2011 sentenced Koko to six years’ rigorous imprisonment. It also fined him around Tk 39 crore and ordered confiscating the laundered money. Saimon was handed down the same sentence.
Koko left the country for Bangkok for treatment on July 19, 2008 after getting out of jail on parole. He was arrested on September 2 the year before along with his mother from their cantonment residence.

One mosquito coil ‘equals 100 cigarettes’

Smoke emitted from one mosquito repellent coil is equivalent to those of 100 cigarettes, thus causing harm to a large number of people, an Indian expert has said.

The information was found in a research work conducted by Pune-based Chest Research Foundation.

“Our experiment showed that the use of one mosquito coil for eight hours is equivalent to the smoking of 100 cigarettes,” BioScholar, NDTV and Times of India reported on Thursday quoting its director Sandeep Salvi as saying at a New Delhi conference on air pollution.

The event was organised by the Centre for Science and Environment (CSE), along with the Indian Council for Medical Research and the Indian Medical Association.

Salvi said there is a lack of awareness about the impact of air pollution on human health.

Pointing out the “lack of research culture” among Indian doctors, he said that indoor air pollution too is a health risk factor.

Participants at the event, which included doctors and health researchers, also spoke about vehicular air pollution in the Indian capital.

According to estimates, about 55 percent of Delhi’s population lives within 500 metres from main roads — and is, therefore, prone to a variety of physical disorders, NDTV said.

“The vehicular pollution is a major concern for the environment. The rising incidents of genetic disorder have a lot to do with air pollution,” said Sanjeev Bagai, the chief executive officer of Batra Hospitals.

India loses one million children under five because of respiratory problems every year, he added.

Bagai said industries also contribute to the air pollution and these need to be shifted out of the capital.

Source: BDNEWS

Karzai, Obama to rebuild strained relations

President Barack Obama said a visit to Washington by President Hamid Karzai of Afghanistan had “reaffirmed their friendship”, as the two leaders engaged in a determined public effort to mend fences.

After months of traded insults which had once threatened the cancellation of Mr Karzai’s trip, Mr Obama said that strains had been “over-stated”.

“Obviously there are going to be tensions in such a complex and difficult environment and a situation in which both Afghans and Americans are making enormous sacrifices,” he said at a press conference in the grand East Room of the White House.

Mr Karzai reciprocated, saying: “There are days we are happy, there are days we are not happy, but it’s a mutual relationship with a common objective.”

The Obama administration has rolled out the red carpet for Mr Karzai’s four-day visit, which ends on Thursday with a visit to Arlington National Cemetery, where many US soldiers who have died in Afghanistan are buried.

With casualties rising and the war becoming more unpopular in the US, senior officials had publicly rebuked the Afghan leader for failing to clamp down on corruption, after he was returned to power for a second term in last year’s fraudulent elections. Mr Karzai retorted that he was thinking of joining the Taliban if the West continued to pressure him to enact reforms.

Having decided to keep criticism private, Mr Obama noted yesterday that progress had been made on corruption, but said “much more” needed to be done in terms of good governance. Mr Karzai vowed to spend US financial resources with “extreme care.”

Both leaders appeared to have aired their own concerns in their talks, which came as the US geared up for a major military operation in the Taliban stronghold of Kandahar province.

Behind the scenes, Mr Karzai pressed for greater support for plans to reintegrate Taliban insurgents, beginning at a “peace jirga” later this month.

Washington is concerned that invitations should not be extended to Taliban leaders in power before the September 11, 2001 attacks orchestrated from then al-Qaeda safe havens.

Steve Clemons, a senior fellow at the New America Foundation think tank, said: “The US is very, very ambivalent about this. There is a lot of discomfort especially among the generals who dislike the idea of giving away too much politically to the insurgents.

Meanwhile, Afghan President Hamid Karzai rounds out his Washington visit Thursday, meeting with congressional leaders and touring the burial grounds of many US troops killed in the Afghanistan war.

During the flagship event of the four-day visit intended to mend fences after months spent trading barbs, US President Barack Obama insisted Wednesday that flared tensions between the Afghan and US governments were “overstated” as Karzai staged an effusive show of support for American war goals.

The leaders met amid pomp at the White House after awkward public exchanges that strained their alliance and complicated Obama’s gamble on a 30,000-strong troop surge designed to forge a US exit from the Afghan battlefield.

Bangladesh moves up economic liberty index

Bangladesh has made significant strides in the Index of Economic Freedom world rankings, making its economy the 137th freest in the world.

In the ranking, the country’s overall score was 51.1, which is 3.6 points higher than that of the last year, according to the report jointly prepared by USA-based think tank Heritage Foundation and the Wall Street Journal.

In the Asia-Pacific region Bangladesh has been ranked 29th out of 41 countries.

“The gains reflect Bangladesh’s improvements in trade freedom and investment freedom,” according to the report.

In the index, the country for the first time graduated itself from the ‘Repressed’ category to the category of ‘Mostly Unfree’ countries.

Praising the country’s performance in last five years, the report said, “Bangladesh has enjoyed impressive economic growth of around 6 percent per year over the past five years driven mainly by its limited but growing services and industrial sectors.”

It, however, said, “Structural and institutional weaknesses remain serious impediments to sustaining such high economic growth rates.”

It said Bangladesh’s economy remains overly dependent on agriculture, which accounts for almost 20 percent of GDP and employs more than half of the labour force.

It also said the heavily politicised weak regulatory regime of the country often tends to crowd out private investment while corruption, coupled with onerous bureaucracy, is still perceived as pervasive.

This year the ranking covered 183 countries measuring 10 components of economic freedom. Score in each category ranged from 0 to 100.

The components were business freedom, trade freedom, fiscal freedom, government spending, monetary freedom, investment freedom, financial freedom, property rights, freedom from corruption and labour freedom.

In the component business freedom Bangladesh scored 59.4 out of 100. The report said in Bangladesh it requires 44 days on average to start a business while the world average is 35 days. However, obtaining a business license requires less than the world average of 18 procedures.

Bangladesh’s score was 58 in trade freedom component. Import and export restrictions, numerous border taxes and fees, burdensome import licencing rules, export subsidies, government monopolies, inefficient and corrupt customs administration, among others, add to the cost of trade in the country, said the report.

Twenty points were deducted from Bangladesh’s trade freedom score to account for non-tariff barriers.

In the monetary freedom component where the country scored 66.6, a total of 15 points were deducted from this component to adjust for price-control measures that distort domestic prices for petroleum products, some pharmaceuticals, and goods produced in state-owned enterprises.

About the financial freedom the report said Bangladesh has made modest progress in recent years in its banking sector adding that the sector is underdeveloped and provides a limited range of banking services.

Bangladesh’s state-owned commercial banks, which account for more than 30 percent of total banking system assets, undermine the sector’s efficiency, it said. Bangladesh scored 20 in the financial freedom component.

In the global context Hong Kong, Singapore, and Australia are the top three scorers in the index while North Korea, Zimbabwe and Cuba were top from the bottom.

In South Asian context Bangladesh’s position was only above Maldives whose rank is 148th. Bhutan’s position was the 103rd, Pakistan’s 117th, Sri Lanka’s 120th, India’s 124th, and Nepal’s 130th.

Though Afghanistan was covered in the index, it was not given any score.

FBCCI demands tax cuts

The country’s apex business association demanded that people earning less than Tk 2 lakh per year should be exempted from paying tax.

At present, those earning more than Tk 1.65 lakh per year are required to pay tax.

Annisul Huq, president of the FBCCI made this recommendation whilst setting out his organisation’s proposals in a pre-budget discussion held on Saturday.

Whilst this proposal was supported by other businessmen during the open discussion, former caretaker government advisor AB Mirza Azizul Islam disagreed.

Azizul Islam said that the limit, at which tax should first be paid, should be fixed in line with the national per capita income.

Comparing Bangladesh to India, the limit in Bangladesh should be Tk 1.25 lakh he said.

“And even if it is raised, it must not be over Tk 1.75 lakh.”

FBCCI also suggested a cut in corporate tax as it was “the highest in the world” and said that lowering it would raise revenue collection.

In his presentation, Annisul Huq proposed 25 percent tax for listed companies, 30 percent for non-listed ones and 40 percent for banks, financial institutions and mobile phone operators.

On this issue Azizul Islam agreed that there should be a cut in corporate tax as it was “high”.

“However, it should be reduced gradually.”

He proposed a reduction between 2 and 2.5 percent for the next year.

The former finance advisor, however, was sceptical about the proposed rates for banks and financial institutions.

“The spread is still too high. Whenever, the lending rate is lowered the banks also slash their deposit rates.” he said.

He said that banks should still have their taxes lowered.

Finance minister AMA Muhith, agreed with his predecessor on banks and financial institutions, but noted that “their gains from the stock market are not taxed either.”

Muhith called for views on imposing tax on capital gains from the stock market, a provision which the government is considering for inclusion in the next budget.

On overall corporate taxes, Muhith felt that they were “not that high”.

The trade body also asked for a restructuring of import duties to favour local industries.

Many of the FBCCI recommendations involved measures that would protect local industries from foreign competition and foster further industrialisation.

Huq said that a reduction in import duties and raw materials along with higher duties on imports of finished goods would foster domestic industrial growth.

On this issue, Azizul Islam also felt the import tax structure should be revised.

“The current structure is aligned with the one formulated during the early ’90s when we were in the spirit of trade liberalisation,” he added.

Finance minister AMA Muhith, however, did not make any comments on income tax and import tariffs saying it was “tough to comment at this moment”.

“Our aim, however, is liberalisation and everything would be considered accordingly.”

Measures to widen the tax net, simplification of income tax procedures, VAT reforms and setting up a National Tax Tribunal also came up in FBCCI’s recommendations.

Responding to the issues, Muhith promised that a tax tribunal would be formed within this fiscal year.

He also said that reforms in VAT and duty would be completed by the next fiscal year.

“There will be no Income Tax Ordinance in the next fiscal year,” added Muhith indicating that a full-fledged law would be formulated.

On simplification of income tax return, Muhith said the current four-page income tax return form might be reduced to two pages to make it easier for people to file.

The FBCCI discussion also stressed power and energy issue along with the necessity of increased focus on railway and waterways development, and population control measures.

It also insisted on urgent measures to ease the traffic congestion of Dhaka. Annisul Huq said in his presentation that traffic congestion caused a loss of $1.84 million every day.

“Annually it stands at about $670 million per year.”