The report, filed to police on Tuesday, recounts the events leading to the discovery of the dramatic theft from an overseas account of Bangladesh Bank.
It says that because of a printer and software problem, it took the Bangladesh central bank nearly four days to ask banks across the globe to halt payments to the hackers.
They tried to steal around $1 billion and got away with $81 million from the impoverished country's coffers.
How a hacker's typo helped stop a billion dollar bank heist
Central bank governor Atiur Rahman and two of the deputy governors have lost their jobs over the scandal, which has hugely embarrassed the government and raised alarm over the security of the country's foreign exchange reserves of over $27 billion.
On Wednesday the government, which has said it was kept in the dark about the losses for weeks, also removed its most senior banking official M. Aslam Alam from his position.
The hackers managed to transfer $81 million on February 5 -- a Friday, when Bangladesh Bank is closed -- from its account with the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, transferring the cash electronically to accounts in the Philippines.
In the report seen by AFP, the bank's joint director Zubair bin Huda said engineers were unable to fix the printers until February 6, a day after the New York bank sent queries about four separate transactions.
"Since such glitches happened before, we thought it was a common problem just like any other day," Huda said in the report.
Bangladesh Bank tried to contact New York on February 6 by email, fax and phone to ask that the transactions be suspended when it realized that the SWIFT interbank messaging system which it normally used was not working properly, Huda said.
"We realized that the SWIFT system being ineffective was an important issue, and therefore we sent an email to Federal Reserve Bank of New York at 1:30pm on February 6 to halt all types of payment processing," he said.
But they were unable to get through as the US bank was closed for the weekend.
It was not until Monday afternoon that the central bank's main server was again working properly and officials were able to send the formal requests to stop the payments to six banks across the globe.
But by that time $81 million had been transferred from Bangladesh Bank's New York account to a bank in the Philippines.
PHILIPPINES ACCOUNT
The money was later transferred to an account belonging to ethnic Chinese businessman William So Go, a Philippine Senate committee heard this week.
The money was then transferred to Philippine casinos, Julia Bacay-Abad from the Philippines' anti-money laundering council told the hearing on Tuesday.
Go's lawyer said the businessman's signatures for his now-frozen RCBC account, which were used to transfer the money, had been forged.
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Another transfer of $20 million was halted by a bank in Sri Lanka at Bangladesh Bank's request.
As details of the scandal emerged last week, Bangladesh Finance Minister A.M.A. Muhith threatened to sue the New York Fed.
The US-based bank said in a statement on its website that the payment instructions "were fully authenticated by the SWIFT messaging system in accordance with standard authentication protocols".
LACK OF TRANSPARENCY
Meanwhile, the $81 million heist has also put a spotlight on the Philippines' strict bank secrecy law. Finance Secretary Cesar Purisima earlier said the Philippines along with Lebanon are some of the only countries in the world left with a bank secrecy law.
Even Switzeland, which is known for its strict banking system, has been open to relax the law.
PH one of few countries with bank secrecy law
According to a law enacted in 1955, all bank deposits in the Philippines are absolutely confidential and may not be examined "except upon written permission of the depositor, or in cases of impeachment, or upon order of a competent court in cases of bribery or dereliction of duty of public officials, or in cases where the money deposited or invested is the subject matter of the litigation."
Last year, Internal Revenue Commissioner Kim Henares said the government is preparing a draft bill that would lift or ease the bank secrecy law to strengthen government's tax collection efforts. Congress, however, thumbed it down.
Makati Business Club chairman Ramon del Rosario said he found it "uncomfortable" that the bank secrecy law was invoked during the Senate investigation on the $81 million heist.
Senator Sergio Osmena III said the international financial community has already taken notice of loopholes in Philippine laws.
"As far as I am concerned, sunlight is the best medicine. Transparency in a democratic setting is the best safeguard against corruption and against bad public officials," he said.
“Despite all the warnings from the FATF (Financial Action Task Force), we still don’t have the political will to plug those loopholes. I hope that this will teach us a lesson because the international financial community has just taken notice of how big our loopholes are and it’s become an international incident because [81 million] dollars was hacked from the account of Bangladesh Central Bank and laundered through the Philippine financial system." With Agence France-Presse
Osmena: Political will needed to plug laundering loopholes
source: www.abs-cbnnews.com
