Bangladesh Untold

Khamba Tarique: The Power Sector Scandal That Left Bangladesh in the Dark

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The Poles That Stole a Nation’s Electricity

In the summer of 2006, a farmer in rural Bogra stood in his field and stared at a concrete pole sticking out of the ground. It had been there for two years. No wires. No transformer. No connection to any grid. Just a gray column of concrete, baking in the sun, doing absolutely nothing.

He was not alone. Across Bangladesh, thousands of these poles stood like sentinels of a theft so brazen it earned the man behind it a nickname that has followed him for two decades: Khamba Tarique. Pole Tarique. The man who turned concrete cylinders into the most expensive decorative items in South Asia.

Between 2001 and 2006, the BNP-Jamaat government spent billions of taka on rural electrification. Thousands of electric poles were purchased at inflated prices and installed across the countryside. A significant number were never connected to anything. The money vanished. The poles remained. And Bangladesh sat in the dark — 16 to 18 hours of load shedding every single day.

A Country in the Dark

Imagine running a factory and having electricity for six hours out of twenty-four. Imagine being a surgeon mid-operation when the lights cut out. Imagine a student trying to study for exams by candlelight — not in the 1800s, but in 2006, in a country with a GDP growth rate of nearly 7%.

This was Bangladesh under BNP rule. The economy was surging. Garments exports were booming. Foreign investment was flowing in. And yet the power sector was in freefall.

Transparency International had already ranked Bangladesh the most corrupt country on earth for five consecutive years — 2001 through 2005. The power sector was ground zero for that corruption. And at the center of it sat a political operator whose office wasn’t in any ministry building, but in a nondescript complex called Hawa Bhaban.

Hawa Bhaban: The Parallel Government

Officially, Hawa Bhaban was the BNP chairman’s office. In practice, it was the clearing house for every major government contract during Khaleda Zia’s 2001-2006 tenure. Tarique Rahman, the Prime Minister’s eldest son, operated from this building as what US diplomats would later call “a parallel power centre where government contracts were influenced in exchange for bribes.”

A 2008 US diplomatic cable — classified CONFIDENTIAL and later released by WikiLeaks — described Tarique Rahman as

“notorious for flagrantly and frequently demanding bribes in connection with government procurement actions and appointments to political office.”

The cable went further. Ambassador James F. Moriarty wrote:

“Tarique is a symbol of kleptocratic government and violent politics in Bangladesh.”

The power sector was one of Hawa Bhaban’s most lucrative prey.

The Minister Who Knew Too Much

In 2001, Khaleda Zia appointed Iqbal Hasan Mahmud as State Minister for Power. His job was to expand electricity access across Bangladesh. Instead, he presided over one of the most spectacular collapses of a power system in recent memory.

Under his watch, power generation actually declined. Not a single megawatt was added to the national grid during the entire BNP tenure. The country’s existing power plants deteriorated from neglect. Load shedding became a way of life — 16 to 18 hours a day in many areas.

Teachers held classes by candlelight. In broad daylight. Farmers couldn’t run irrigation pumps. Industrial production ground to a halt. Crime spiked in neighborhoods that went dark at 6 PM.

On May 21, 2006, the government finally sacked Iqbal Hasan Mahmud.

His replacement, Major (Retd.) Anwarul Kabir Talukdar, walked into the ministry and found a crime scene. After inspecting the documents, he went public with what he found:

“There were anomalies every day during the previous minister’s tenure. Staff under the previous minister got involved in this corruption. Crores of taka have been embezzled daily in the name of power plant repair. But there is no account of the project. Thousands of crores of money have been looted and swindled.”

The numbers were staggering. Thousands of crores of taka — billions in today’s terms — had been siphoned through fictitious repair projects, inflated procurement contracts, and phantom installations.

Iqbal Hasan Mahmud’s defense was revealing. He didn’t deny the corruption. He said:

“The aim was to work properly. But I could not do anything due to surrounding pressure and various complications.”

The “surrounding pressure” was Hawa Bhaban. No one in the government dared interfere with Tarique Rahman’s operations.

Khamba Limited: How It Worked

The scheme was elegant in its simplicity. Bangladesh’s Rural Electrification Board needed electric poles — thousands of them — to expand the national grid into villages and towns that had never had power. The procurement contracts for these poles were routed through Hawa Bhaban.

Poles were purchased from companies connected to Tarique Rahman’s associates at prices far above market rate. They were then installed across rural Bangladesh with great fanfare — ribbon-cuttings, press releases, promises of electrification.

The problem was that many of the poles were never connected to any power line. No wires. No transformers. No substations. Just concrete posts standing in fields, beside roads, in village squares — monuments to a theft that everyone could see but no one could stop.

The total amount embezzled through this single scheme has been estimated at Tk 20,000 crore — approximately $2.9 billion at the time. That figure comes from multiple Bangladeshi news sources who reported on the scandal during and after the BNP’s tenure.

The nickname stuck. Khamba Tarique. It appeared in newspaper headlines, in opposition speeches, in dinner-table conversation across the country. When Time magazine profiled Tarique Rahman in January 2026 — after his return from exile and election as Prime Minister — they noted that “to many Bangladeshis, Rahman is still snidely known as Khamba Tarique.”

The One Achievement

There is one documented power-sector achievement from the BNP’s 2001-2006 tenure. On September 3, 2005, the Tongi Power Station was brought back online after an overhaul. Prime Minister Khaleda Zia herself inaugurated it.

Then the power station tripped. Before she could reach Abdullahpur in Uttara. The Prime Minister’s motorcade was still en route from the inauguration when the plant shut down.

You could not write a better metaphor for the BNP’s entire power sector record.

What the US Embassy Saw

Ambassador Moriarty’s 2008 cable didn’t just describe Tarique as corrupt in general terms. It listed specific cases with specific dollar amounts:

  • Siemens: 2% commission on all Siemens deals in Bangladesh, paid in USD, pursued by the FBI and DOJ Asset Forfeiture unit.
  • Harbin Company (Chinese): $750,000 paid to Tarique, transported to Singapore for deposit at Citibank.
  • Monem Construction: $450,000 bribe for government contracts.
  • Al Amin Construction: Owner threatened with closure unless he paid $150,000.

The cable also documented a $3.1 million bribe (210 million taka) to thwart a murder prosecution, and Tk 20 million stolen from the Zia Orphanage Trust — money meant for parentless children.

The ambassador’s assessment was unflinching:

“In short, much of what is wrong in Bangladesh can be blamed on Tarique and his cronies. His flagrant disregard for the rule of law has provided potent ground for terrorists to gain a foothold in Bangladesh.”

The Aftermath — and the Amnesty

When the military-backed caretaker government took over in January 2007, Tarique Rahman was arrested. He faced 84 charges — embezzlement, money laundering, orchestrating the August 21 grenade attack. He spent 18 months in prison, where he says he was tortured, suffering spinal injuries that still affect him.

Then the political winds shifted. Sheikh Hasina returned to power in 2009. The cases against Tarique became tools in the Awami League’s own power games — prosecuted vigorously when convenient, negotiated away when not. In 2013, a trial court acquitted him in the Tk 20.41 crore money laundering case. In 2016, the High Court overturned that acquittal and sentenced him to seven years. In 2024, the Supreme Court stayed the sentence. In March 2025, the Appellate Division acquitted him entirely.

All 84 cases. Gone.

The Khamba Tarique scandal was never independently investigated after the caretaker government’s mandate expired. No audit was published. No one went to jail for the phantom poles. The poles themselves — thousands of them — still stand in fields across Bangladesh, slowly crumbling, concrete evidence of a theft that was never prosecuted.

The Poles Are Still There

What makes the Khamba scandal different from other corruption cases is its visibility. Most corruption is hidden — money moved through shell companies, deposits in foreign banks, contracts buried in bureaucratic filing cabinets. The Khamba scandal was hiding in plain sight. You could drive through rural Bangladesh and physically count the evidence.

That’s why the nickname endured. You can erase court records. You can overturn convictions. You can rewrite history books. But you can’t make thousands of concrete poles disappear from the landscape without anyone noticing.

And people noticed. When Tarique Rahman gave his first interview to Time magazine after returning from 17 years of exile — positioning himself as a reformer, a bridge between Bangladesh’s political aristocracy and its young revolutionaries — the magazine felt compelled to mention Khamba Tarique within the first few paragraphs. His own supporters acknowledge the name. His detractors wield it like a weapon.

When Tarique told Time that “they have failed to prove anything,” he was technically correct. Every conviction was overturned. Every case was dismissed. But the poles don’t lie. They stand in the ground, mute and patient, waiting for a grid that was promised twenty years ago and never came.

The farmer in Bogra moved on. He bought a diesel generator. It cost him more than electricity ever would have. It broke down regularly. The fuel was expensive. But at least it worked. Unlike the pole in his field, which still stands there, a monument to what Bangladesh could have been if the money had gone to wires instead of pockets.

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