When a Dhaka court issued arrest warrants against five Foodpanda Bangladesh officials this week, two facts sat side by side in the same reports and looked contradictory: warrants had been issued, and the company said every one of those five already held bail from the High Court. Both are true, and neither is unusual. Here is the sequence.
This is general information about procedure, not legal advice. Anyone actually facing a case should talk to a lawyer.
1. The case starts with a person, not the police
Most criminal matters in Bangladesh begin with an FIR at a police station. But a private individual can also go straight to a magistrate and file what is called a petition case — a complaint made on oath under section 200 of the Code of Criminal Procedure, 1898. The complainant is examined, and the magistrate then decides what to do with it.
2. The magistrate can send it to the police first
Rather than issuing process immediately, the magistrate can hold off and order an inquiry or an investigation — in practice, directing a named police station to look into it and report back. That is what happened here: the court sent the matter to Gulshan police station and waited for reports.
This step is why the story took more than a year to reach the headlines. The complaints were filed in July last year; the police reports went to the court in June and July this year.
3. Accepting the report is the decision point
When the police report comes back, the magistrate can accept it or not. Accepting a report that supports the allegations means the court takes cognisance and issues process to bring the accused before it. Process is either a summons or a warrant, and which one issues depends on the nature of the offence and on whether the court expects the accused to appear.
This is the point most often misread. A warrant at this stage is a tool to secure attendance — it says the court now requires these people in front of it. It is not a verdict, and it does not mean the court has concluded that anything alleged is true. The evidence has not been tested; the trial has not started.
4. Bail can come before the warrant does
Here is the part that surprises people. Once a person knows a criminal case naming them exists — which they usually do, long before any warrant — they can ask the High Court Division for anticipatory bail: an order that if a warrant issues, they are not to be taken into custody, on conditions the court sets. It is a well-established remedy and it is routinely sought in commercial disputes that have turned criminal.
So the two headlines are perfectly compatible. The magistrate's court issued process; the High Court had already ordered that these particular people should not be detained on it. The next step is that they appear, formally surrender to the trial court's jurisdiction, and the case proceeds.
5. What still has to happen before anyone is guilty of anything
A long way remains: charges have to be framed, evidence led, witnesses examined and cross-examined, and a judgment delivered. Cases can also end earlier — quashed by the High Court, withdrawn, or settled, which is common where the root of the matter is money.
The bit that is genuinely contested
There is a real argument underneath all this, and it is worth naming. Bangladesh sees a steady stream of criminal cases filed over what are, in substance, contract disputes — unpaid invoices, disputed deductions, dishonoured cheques. Naming a company's senior officers personally raises the pressure enormously, because the cost of defending a criminal case falls on individuals.
The counter-argument is just as real: for a small supplier facing a large company, a civil suit can take many years, and the criminal route is sometimes the only one that produces a response at all. Dishonoured cheques have their own track under section 138 of the Negotiable Instruments Act, 1881, which is itself a criminal remedy for a commercial wrong.
In the Foodpanda matter each side is making exactly one of these arguments. The complainant says money was taken through falsified returns; the company says the cases are a retaliatory response to a commercial dispute in which it is the one owed money, and that it will establish in court that the dispute is contractual with no criminal liability on its employees. Which account is right is what a trial is for. Our full report on the warrants is here. The same tension ran through the 2021 e-commerce collapse, when entrepreneurs argued against a new law and regulator while suppliers went to the courts instead.
