There is an old joke in political circles — one that is darkly funny precisely because it is so reliably true — that power is never really lost. It merely changes addresses. In Bangladesh, that joke has taken on a particularly brazen new form. Within twenty-four hours of the interim government’s dissolution, its two most prominent press officials had already found employment. No gap. No waiting. No uncertainty. The job, it seems, found them.

That detail alone is worth sitting with for a moment.

Shafiqul Alam, who served as Press Secretary to the former Chief Adviser, and Abul Kalam Azad Majumdar, who held the post of Deputy Press Secretary, are both headed to a new English-language daily called “Daily Wada”. Most Bangladeshis — and most journalists, for that matter — had never heard of this publication before last week. That is not particularly surprising. As of this writing, “Daily Wada” does not meaningfully exist in the media market. It is, by all accounts, a newspaper in anticipation rather than in circulation.

But the ownership structure behind it? That is where the story gets complicated. And where it demands scrutiny.

The paper is reportedly set to launch under the umbrella of MGH Group — a Singapore-headquartered multinational conglomerate with substantial business interests in Bangladesh, led by its Global CEO Anis Ahmed Gorky, a Bangladeshi national. Nothing inherently scandalous there, one might argue. Bangladesh’s media landscape has long been dominated by business conglomerates. Since the 1990s, ownership of newspapers and television channels by industrialists has become almost a structural feature of the country’s press ecosystem, not an anomaly. The Bangladeshi public has, with considerable fatalism, largely accepted this reality.

But this particular case carries a twist that cannot be argued away so easily.

Anis Ahmed Gorky was, not long ago, the subject of a serious corruption case. In December 2022, Bangladesh’s Anti-Corruption Commission ( ACC) filed charges against him alleging illicit acquisition of assets worth approximately 1.36 billion taka and money laundering. By March 2024, the ACC had approved a formal chargesheet. The investigators had combed through his finances and found that while around 1.18 billion taka of his assets could be traced to documented business income — freight operations, software subscriptions, group company revenues — a residual 172 million taka had no verifiable legitimate source. The chargesheet was approved. The case moved forward. And then, six months later, the interim government of Muhammad Yunus quietly withdrew it.

On October 15, 2024, a Dhaka court accepted the state’s withdrawal of the case. The ACC, in an almost theatrical reversal, declared that there was now “insufficient evidence” to continue proceedings — this after approving the chargesheet just months prior. The English daily “New Age” reported the development at the time, though it attracted far less public attention than it deserved.

Now here is where intellectual honesty compels us to ask the uncomfortable questions that institutional timidity tends to smother.

Was the withdrawal of this case procedurally proper? Was the Chief Adviser’s office in any way involved in the decision? And — the question that ties everything together — was there a transaction, explicit or implicit, between the granting of that legal relief and the subsequent employment of the Chief Adviser’s own press officials at an enterprise owned by the very same beneficiary?

These are not rhetorical flourishes. They are logical inferences that any reasonable observer would draw from the sequence of events. History offers us enough precedents to understand how these arrangements typically work. They rarely involve signed contracts or explicit negotiations. They operate instead through what the political scientist Albert Hirschman might have called “the exit option with benefits” — the quiet understanding that proximity to power, when properly managed, yields its own dividends once power formally ends.

Think about how this looks when you lay it flat: A businessman faces a major corruption case. The interim government that runs the country withdraws that case. Months later, that same government ceases to exist. And within a single day of its dissolution, the government’s chief media officials — the very people who shaped public communication for that administration — are announced as senior figures at a newspaper owned by the man whose case was dropped. The dots are not hidden. They are sitting in plain sight, waiting to be connected.

This is not merely a story about two press officials getting jobs. Every government official eventually needs employment after their tenure ends — that is not the scandal. The scandal, if there is one, is in the particular configuration of relationships. It is in who owns the paper, what happened to his legal troubles, and when. The timing does not merely raise eyebrows. It demands a formal accounting.

One can already anticipate the defenses that will be mounted. That the ACC independently decided the evidence was insufficient. That there is no documented link between the case withdrawal and any subsequent employment arrangement. That “Daily Wada” may not even be an MGH Group property in the final analysis — that reporting has been unclear. All of this is technically plausible. In journalism, as in law, plausibility is not innocence, but it does counsel restraint before certainty is claimed.

And yet restraint is not the same as silence.

What Bangladesh’s press and its institutions now owe the public is a clear-eyed investigation into whether the withdrawal of Anis Ahmed Gorky’s corruption case was tainted by improper influence — from within the now-dissolved interim government’s own structure. The officials who made that withdrawal decision, the lawyers who argued for it, the timeline of communications between the ACC and the Chief Adviser’s office: all of it should be part of the public record.

Because if the revolving door between political power and business benefit can spin this fast — one day after a government falls — then the door itself has become the problem. And no democracy can afford to ignore what walks through it.

The questions are not radical. They are the minimum that accountability requires. And in a country that has sacrificed so much for the promise of better governance, minimum accountability ought to be the easiest thing to demand. The incumbent government must investigate this matter thoroughly.

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