The Economist: Unraveling state capture – lessons from Bangladesh, Poland, and South Africa
Key topics
Bangladesh targets reforms after $21bn bank looting by crony networks
State capture is rising globally, including in China and the U.S.
South Africa, Poland, and Bangladesh show fragile hope for recovery
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From The Economist, published under licence. The original article can be found on www.economist.com
© 2025 The Economist Newspaper Limited. All rights reserved.
The Economist
The 15-70-15 rule and other ways to prise powerful fingers from the public coffers
Bank regulators are seldom celebrities. But Ahsan Mansur, the governor of Bangladesh’s central bank, is an exception. Since he took over in August, after an autocratic prime minister, Sheikh Hasina, was overthrown by protests, his job has been to untangle the criminal mess she left behind.
Connected tycoons schemed with military-intelligence agents to loot the banking system, Mr Mansur says, siphoning away $21bn. The spooks helped the tycoons to forcibly take over banks and then issue loans to their new shareholders, which were not repaid, alleges Mr Mansur. On some occasions, he says, agents seized board members from their homes and forced them at gunpoint to resign.
The pillaging of Bangladeshi savings was a brazen example of a global scourge: state capture. This is when the powers and resources of the state are hijacked for the benefit of a few. It is a broader concept than corruption, since it includes acts that are not against the law, but should be. It can involve rewriting rules to benefit insiders, stuffing institutions with placemen, channelling favours to cronies, intimidating businesses into appeasing the powerful, and gutting checks and balances. The aim may be self-enrichment, or strengthening the captor’s grip on power, or both.