NCA freezes £90m of London property linked to former Bangladesh regime

In a high-stakes move that heralds a hardening of the UK’s approach to illegal money laundering in London, the National Crime Agency (NCA) said it has frozen assets of more than £90 million belonging to a politically exposed individual from a previous government in Bangladesh, officials confirmed to this publication exclusively.

The move by the National Crime Agency to seize and freeze 43 luxury London properties thought to have been bought using suspected laundered cash believed to have been siphoned off from Bangladesh a decade ago, at a time of widespread political corruption and secrecy, is unprecedented.

In an operation earlier this week that commenced at dawn, NCA officers and investigators, working with the UK’s Economic Crime Unit, executed Unexplained Wealth Orders (UWOs) on a collection of assets located in Knightsbridge, Mayfair, Canary Wharf, and South Kensington. The properties included many that were in a structure of offshore shell companies registered in the British Virgin Islands, Jersey, and Dubai.

The properties are said to have connections to a former senior official in the now-defunct administration that controversially ruled Bangladesh during a period of alleged mass embezzlement, political suppression, and deals in the dark of offshore financing in the early 2010s.

The NCA has not officially named the relevant individual, but based on the court documents and leaked bank records obtained as part of the “Dhaka Dossier,” a collaborative investigation by UK and Bangladeshi journalists, it appears to link to a former Energy and Infrastructure adviser, a member of a challenging ruling family, whose family amassed astonishing accumulation of wealth in the final years of the regime’s power.

Wealth was allegedly transferred as a result of contracts with the Bangladeshi state, inflating the value of procurement contracts, and kickbacks that were laundered through banks in Singapore and the Emirates before being funneled into the UK property market.

In 2022, a forensic audit ordered by the Anti-Corruption Commission of Bangladesh revealed nearly $US 300 million of suspicious transactions between Bangladeshi state agencies and shell companies owned by associates of the officials. The trail was established in London, where substantial sums were used to purchase high-value property, usually remaining vacant and sporadically rented on the quiet to foreign diplomats via short corporate leases. One of the properties that were acquired was a £12 million Belgravia townhouse purchased by a company that had only had £100 in declared capital, sat vacant for several years before intermittently being let to foreign diplomats at well-above market rates.

This action is part of a wider NCA strategy to target foreign kleptocrats shifting their stolen money through London’s property market. Following the launch of the Economic Crime (Transparency and Enforcement) Act, British authorities have obtained updated powers to investigate murky ownership and suspicious wealth.

Graeme Biggar, NCA Director General, recently said: “London will no longer be a haven for criminal wealth. Our message is simple: if you cannot say where it is from, you cannot keep it.

Lawyers for the unidentified Bangladeshi person expect the court proceedings to extend into 2026, because they will be fighting the application claiming that the assets were acquired legally. However, sources close to the case indicated that several properties, bank accounts, or even art collections could soon be targeted as investigators continue the case.

For now, the properties are sealed, and a previously untouchable empire is now vulnerable.

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