Sohel Parvez

With penalty, they owe government over Tk 7,000cr; S Alam Group director says they didn’t ‘evade even a single taka in VAT’

Every US dollar went for Tk 118 on the interbank platform of Bangladesh yesterday, the highest since the central bank loosened its grip on the exchange rate by letting market dynamics determine the prices.

Bangladeshi nationals and banks kept 17.71 million Swiss francs (CHF) in deposits last year in the banks of Switzerland, the lowest on record, reflecting the fading attractiveness of the country among the wealthy to park money.

The government has cut distribution plans for food grains for the upcoming fiscal year of 2024-25, which economists say is an illogical decision since food inflation has soared above 10 percent in the past two months

The tax measures unveiled yesterday for 2024-25 are not going to provide any relief to taxpayers.

The development comes after Bangladesh Bank relaxed the rules and allowed banks to receive funds from the OBUs amounting to up to 40 percent of their regulatory capital to settle payment obligations.

The government is expanding the size of the national budget every year. However, it has fallen short of attaining its targets over the years, be that in terms of revenue collection or development expenditure.

Data by the finance ministry showed that the allocation for the pensions and interest payments account for 30 percent of the total social security programme fund of Tk 126,090 crore for the current fiscal year of 2023-24.

To many, especially salaried and fixed-income individuals, this means they will have no option but to find ways to cut expenditures to bear increased electricity bills.

The two made Tk 333 crore profit in nine months

After parking his motorcycle and removing his helmet, a young biker opened a red umbrella and stood on the footpath.

Yesterday, the price of coarse grain, the benchmark variety, was 6.25 percent higher year-on-year, reaching Tk 50 to Tk 52 per kilogramme at retail markets in Dhaka.

On April 4, the Federation of Bangladesh Chambers of Commerce and Industry (FBCCI) urged the government to pay attention to ensuring reasonable protection from customs tariffs for the sake of employment and promoting domestic industries, services and small and medium enterprises.

The central bank has already unveiled a framework to address vulnerabilities in the banking sector, rein in non-performing loans (NPLs) and punish wilful defaulters.

In 2021, some 2.25 percent of the population used SHSs. The number declined to 1.81 percent in 2023, according to a recent survey report of the Bangladesh Bureau of Statistics (BBS).

A provision in the Income Tax Act 2023 created the discrimination

The dependency ratio of the people who are over 65-plus years rose to 9.4 percent in 2023 from 8.6 percent in 2022.

Here, the steady growth of Bangladesh’s economy -- around 6 percent annually -- for the last two decades, and subsequent increases in overall buying capacity, played a big role. Another factor is the increasing domestic assembly of these items by local companies.

The use of the document verification system (DVS) has increased in Bangladesh in the last couple of years, plugging the scope for unruly firms to submit forged audit reports. The number of audit reports signed by accountants by securing codes from the DVS rose by nearly 2 percent year-on-year to 38,316 in 2021-22 compared to a year prior, data from the Institute of Chartered Accountants of Bangladesh (ICAB) showed.

Banks in Bangladesh witnessed a sharp decline in deposits in rural areas in the last quarter of 2023, the first fall in five years, data from the central bank showed.