The Islami Bank of Bangladesh Limited started operations in March 1983 with about 70 percent of its initial capital provided by Saudi and Kuwaiti investors, among institutions including the Islamic Development Bank, Kuwait Finance House, Dubai Islamic Bank and Saudi Arabia’s Al-Rajhi Group. The idea for the bank originated in 1975, the year after Sheikh Mujibur Rahman was assassinated, at the initiative of Fuad Abdullah Al-Khatib, then Saudi Arabia’s ambassador to Bangladesh. By the time the bank formally launched in 1983, it had built into its ownership structure Gulf capital networks that Jamaat-e-Islami used as its principal financial arm for decades.

Mir Quasem Ali, a Jamaat central executive committee member who was executed in 2016 for war crimes committed during the 1971 conflict, served as a director of the bank and simultaneously as the Bangladesh country director of Rabeta-al-Alam-al-Islami, a Saudi Arabia-based organisation. Through that dual role, researchers and journalists tracking the bank’s history have documented that funds from Rabeta, the Kuwait Relief Fund and the Al-Nahiyan Trust of the UAE were channelled into Jamaat-linked institutions. Bangladesh Bank imposed a penalty on the bank in 2006 under money-laundering regulations. Researchers studying foreign funding flows into Bangladesh have documented that Jamaat-linked channels,........

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