A special court in Dhaka has indicted six people, including the former chief of the Directorate General of Health Services Md Abud Kalam Azad, in a case filed by the Anti-Corruption Commission (ACC) over the much-talked-about Regent Hospital scam.
Disgraced businessman Mohammad Shahed, the chairman of Regent Hospital along with former DGHS director Aminul Hasan, Deputy Director Yunus Ali, Assistant Director Shafiur Rahman and Research Officer Didarul Islam are also implicated in the case.
Judge Al Asad Md Asifuzzaman of the Sixth Special Judge's Court framed the charges against the accused on Sunday after dismissing their pleas of quashing the case.
The judge also fixed Jul 4 for the examination of witnesses in the case, reports bdnews24.com.
Azad and four former DGHS employees are currently on bail while Shahed is still languishing behind bars.
Petitioning for the dismissal of the charges against him in court, Azad said, “I was not involved in any wrongdoing. So, why am I being indicted in this case?”
In reply, the ACC's prosecutor Mahmud Hossain Jahangir said: “That’s how the law works. It is the procedure. The trial will proceed, and a verdict will be delivered in due time,” he said.
The DGHS partnered with Regent Hospital in March 2020 for the treatment of Covid-19 patients.
But reports of irregularities in the deal sparked a massive outcry on national and social media, prompting the government to seal off the hospital in July 2020. The hospital’s chairman Shahed was subsequently arrested from Satkhira a week later.
According to a Rapid Action Battalion intelligence report, the hospital collected samples from at least 10,000 people and issued fake negative certificates for two-thirds of those people.
The ACC’s then deputy director Md Farid Ahmed Patwary started the case in September 2020 over the embezzlement of public funds worth Tk 33.4 million.
Azad, who resigned as the DG of services in the wake of the scandal, was not initially a suspect in the case but his name was added after an investigation into the matter.
The DGHS signed the deal with Regent Hospital after the government detected the first Covid-19 cases in the country. But the hospital's licence to operate had expired at the time.
The directorate later said it had signed the contract on orders from high-ups in the health ministry.
According to the case statement, the five DGHS employees used their positions to aid Shahed, the owner of Regent Hospital, to turn it into a dedicated Covid-19 hospital without renewing its license.
The ACC also alleges that the accused misappropriated over Tk 13.7 million by testing samples of Covid-19 patients in a government laboratory. The hospital also drew over Tk 19.6 million as monthly charges for doctors, nurses, other health workers, officials and staffers.
The anti-graft watchdog submitted a chargesheet against the five DGHS employees and Shahed to a Dhaka court in September 2021.