Update, October 2026 — The word in this 2021 headline worth noticing is again. One ministry asking another a second time is the whole structural problem, and the eventual fix routed around it. What that referral revealed is below the original article.
Evaly violated many provisions of the Penal Code 1860, Digital Security Act and Consumer Rights Protection Act, said Hafizur Rahman, additional secretary of the commerce ministry.
A letter will soon be issued to the home ministry based on recommendations of the inter-ministerial committee on e-commerce, he added.
Earlier in July, the commerce ministry in a letter requested the Public Security Division of the home ministry to take actions against Evaly based on a report prepared by the home ministry.
Upon receiving the letter, the Criminal Investigation Department filed a money laundering case against another e-commerce platform DhamakaShopping but has not taken any step against Evaly.
The controversial digital marketplace itself estimated Tk311 crore dues to its customers and Tk206 crore to merchants.
Evaly CEO Mohammad Rassel informed the commerce ministry that it would pay off the dues to its customers in five months if it could draw expected investments. He, however, did not say anything about paying off the merchants.
Hafizur said the government will give utmost priority to retrieving customers' money from Evaly. But they cannot guarantee it.
"Customers will get their refunds only if we can detect where Evaly has laundered or transferred the money to," he also said.
As per the Companies Act, the government cannot appoint an administrator to any company without the court's permission. However, they will look into whether it is possible for the government to appoint an administrator in an exceptional circumstance like Evaly's case.
The commerce ministry will decide its own course after discussing all the issues.
The Bangladesh Bank has requested the commerce ministry to appoint firms to conduct financial audits into 10 errant e-commerce companies. In this case, there are also some legal obligations. If the law permits, the commerce ministry will audit 10 companies, including Evaly.
Allegations are also rife that Evaly part, Alesha Mart, Dhamaka, E-orange, Sirajganj Shop, Aladiner Prodip, Qcoom, BoomBoom, Adyan Mart and Need.com.bd also received advance payments from customers, but they are neither giving products nor refunds.
Hafizur said they will request the home ministry to take similar legal action against these companies if they are found to have defrauded customers and merchants.
What the referral revealed
A commerce ministry that must ask a home ministry to act, and then ask a second time, has identified a problem it has no power to address. That is not an accusation against either department — it is a description of how the authority was distributed.
Commerce could see the harm: platforms taking deposits they could not honour, complaints accumulating, a sector losing confidence. What commerce could not do was investigate, arrest or prosecute. Those powers sat elsewhere, with a ministry whose priorities were set by an entirely different workload.
Meanwhile the money kept moving. Bangladesh Bank later established that Tk6,050 crore passed through payment gateways to 25 online sellers in a four-month window — a period that overlaps with exactly this kind of inter-ministerial correspondence.
The fix went around the problem
What eventually worked did not improve coordination between ministries. It moved the control to an institution that did not need anyone's cooperation to act.
Bangladesh Bank sits on the payment rails by default. It did not have to request action from another department to change how merchant settlements work — it regulates the banks and payment providers directly, and could simply require that a customer's advance be held until goods arrive.
One institution, one instruction, no referral. That is why a payments rule succeeded where a sequence of letters between ministries did not, and it is the most transferable observation in this story.
What inter-agency gaps cost
The coordination failure did not end with the platforms. When the commerce ministry later asked Bangladesh Bank to begin refunding customers, it emerged that no agency held a usable list of which companies were under suit — the same distribution of partial information across bodies that had slowed the original response.
The High Court eventually required the finance, commerce, information and home secretaries, the Governor of Bangladesh Bank, the ACC chairman and the head of the Bangladesh Financial Intelligence Unit to establish whose negligence had allowed the schemes to operate. Needing a court to convene officials in order to determine which officials had failed is the clearest available measure of how far apart they were working.
The practical lesson for anyone designing oversight of a fast-moving market: the question is not whether some agency has the relevant power. It is whether the agency that can see the problem is the same one that can act on it. Where those differ, the gap between them is measured in months, and in this case in thousands of crore.
