Update, October 2026 — The custody decision reported here was an early point in a sequence that ended with convictions in four cases and both defendants recorded as absconding. How the custody question resolved is below the original article.
Police will not seek fresh remand for Mohammad Rassel, CEO of Evaly, in a case filed over an allegation of embezzling Tk37 lakh and fraudulence, says Nazmul Huda, Investigating Officer of the case.
He will be produced before the court on Thursday after completion of a one-day remand in the case filed with Dhanmondi Police Station.
"We are now cross-checking the information received from him during the remand," told Nazmul, also sub inspector (SI) Dhanmondi Police Station, told on Wednesday.
During the questioning, Rassel told police that if he is released quickly, he would be able to pay off debts of around Tk950 crore to customers and businessmen.
He also denied the issuance of any death threat to a businessman, the investigation officials informed on Wednesday, citing interrogation of Russel in police custody.
Russell, managing director of Evaly, claimed that he did not siphon off any money out of the country.
Investigation Officer (SI) Nazmul Huda said police questioned Russel about non-payment of money to a trader after buying goods from him.
Russel will be sent to court on Thursday morning with no fresh remanded plea, he added.
Meanwhile, the High Court has banned the sale and transfer of assets of controversial e-commerce platform Evaly.
The Bangladesh E-Commerce Welfare Association has formed a human chain demo to press home their seven-point demand including the release of Evaly MD Mohammad Russell and its chairman Shamima Nasrin.
What happened next
Updated September 2026. Rassel's promise to repay Tk 950 crore if released did not persuade the courts. He and Shamima Nasrin were remanded and charged in a string of cases filed by customers and suppliers over undelivered orders and bounced cheques, and in October 2021 the High Court replaced Evaly's management with a board led by former justice AHM Shamsuddin Chowdhury Manik, which found the company's records incomplete and its liabilities far larger than its assets. Shamima Nasrin was bailed in April 2022 and took Evaly back from the court board later that year, relaunching it with cash-on-delivery only; Rassel remained in jail until December 2023, when he was released after obtaining bail in the last of the cases against him. Most customers who paid in advance in 2021 have not been refunded, and the episode led directly to the escrow rule that now holds an e-commerce payment until the buyer confirms delivery.
How the custody question resolved
Remand ended, bail followed, and the prosecutions proceeded at the pace of the court system rather than the investigation. Mohammad Rassel and Shamima Nasrin were eventually convicted in four separate cases — terms of five, three, two and one year, each carrying a fine; the shortest came from Chattogram, on a bounced cheque.
By the time those judgments arrived, neither was before the court. Both are recorded as absconding, with conviction and arrest warrants outstanding.
What remand is for, and what it is not
This deserves setting out, because the 2021 reporting of these decisions treated custody as a proxy for how seriously the case was being taken, and it is not one.
Remand is an investigative tool. Police seek it to question a suspect about facts they cannot otherwise establish. Where the evidence is documentary — bank statements, order records, delivery logs — interrogation adds very little, because the records say what they say whether or not the accused confirms them.
The Evaly cases were documentary almost entirely. Bangladesh Bank's inspection had already established the gap between liabilities and assets. Individual complaints turned on a payment made and goods not delivered. There was little a further remand could have produced.
Not seeking remand was therefore a reasonable investigative judgement. The public reading of it as leniency reflects a common confusion between pre-trial custody and the strength of a case.
The question that actually mattered
Not remand but flight. The decision with lasting consequences was not how long anyone was questioned; it was what conditions attached to release, and whether the court was satisfied the accused would return.
That judgement is made early, on limited information, in cases where the state's own investigation is incomplete. It is also effectively irreversible: once a defendant has left, a conviction obtained in absence is a statement rather than a remedy, and the warrants outstanding in this case have no mechanism behind them while the accused are not in the country.
The pattern repeated across the sector. The principals of two of the largest platforms of the period were reported to be living abroad by the time the cases matured — which is the argument for treating asset preservation and travel restriction as the urgent steps in financial cases, rather than custody for questioning.
