Update, October 2026 — This report covers the side of the collapse that received least attention: the merchants who had shipped goods and not been paid. They were creditors, not customers, and the remedies built afterwards were not designed for them. What happened to the suppliers is below the original article.
"A supplier named Kamrul Islam Chakdar filed the case with Dhanmondi police station on Saturday night bringing allegation of embezzling Tk36 lakh," said Abdullah Al Masum, assistant commissioner of Dhanmondi Zone on Sunday morning.
In the case, he mentioned the names of 12 officials and another 15 to 20 unnamed people have also been made accused.
The other accused in the case are - Evaly Vice President Akash, Manager Jahedul Islam Hemoy, Senior Accounts Manager Tanvir Alam, Senior Executive Commercial Jawadul Haque Chowdhury, Head of Accounts Selim Reza, Accounts Manager Zubair Al Mahmud, Accounts Officer Sohel, Akibur Rahman Turzo, Rassel's PS Md Rezwan, Shakib Rahman of Bike Department.
In the statement, the plaintiff mentioned that he had supplied goods worth about Tk 36 lakh to Evaly but the e-commerce platform did not pay his dues.
The plaintiff alleged that Evaly did not pay the plaintiff's dues till January and then gave a cheque in May dated 30 June.
However, the cheque bounced twice mentioning not enough funds in the account. On 29 August, the plaintiff sent Evaly a letter and did not get any reply. Then Evaly said they would pay the dues within 30 days of supplying the products and singed documents. Then again, the officials could not be contacted.
In this regard, a general diary was filed on 12 January with Dhanmondi Model police station, Evaly yet made no contact with the plaintiff. When the plaintiff went to Evaly's office, the officials misbehaved with him and even threatened him.
n primary interrogation, Mohammad Rassel told the Rapid Action Battalion (RAB) that his company owes more than Tk1,000 crore to customers and merchants – although just a few days ago, he had disclosed a much lower amount.
RAB on Friday said the Evaly CEO also had planned either to sell the company to a foreign e-commerce firm or to declare bankruptcy for failing to pay off the huge amount of liabilities.
Evaly's controversial business strategy has come to the fore following a central bank inspection report on the e-commerce firm.
What happened to the suppliers
Bangladesh Bank's inspection counted what was owed to customers and merchants together: Tk403.80 crore against Tk65.17 crore of current assets. Suppliers were inside that figure, competing for the same inadequate pool.
Their position was worse than a customer's in three specific ways, and the distinction is rarely drawn.
- They had already delivered. A customer who had not received goods was out of pocket by the purchase price. A supplier who had shipped stock was out of pocket by the wholesale cost of goods now sitting in other people's homes.
- Their exposure was larger and concentrated. A merchant supplying a platform at volume has a single counterparty representing a large share of its receivables. There is no diversification to fall back on.
- They are not consumers. Consumer protection machinery — the complaints route, the directorate, the eventual escrow rule — is built for buyers. A business-to-business trade debt falls outside it and is pursued through ordinary commercial litigation, which is slow and costs money the supplier no longer has.
Why the escrow rule does not help them
This is the gap worth naming, because it persists.
The reform that followed holds a customer's advance until the customer receives goods. It protects the consumer leg of the transaction completely and leaves the supplier leg exactly as it was: a merchant still ships on credit terms to a platform, still waits to be paid, and still has no mechanism ensuring the platform can pay.
A platform that cannot touch customer money until delivery is in fact more dependent on supplier credit than before, not less. The working capital has to come from somewhere, and the obvious somewhere is the people shipping the goods.
So the structural lesson for any merchant selling through a marketplace, anywhere: the consumer protections announced after a collapse are not yours. Trade credit insurance, shorter payment terms, and a limit on how much of your receivables sit with one platform remain entirely your own problem.
How the cases ended
The prosecutions that reached judgment were the consumer ones — straightforward failures to deliver paid-for goods. Evaly's managing director and chairperson were convicted across four separate cases with sentences from one to five years, and are recorded as absconding with warrants outstanding.
Supplier claims, being civil trade debts against an insolvent counterparty, had no comparable route. Winning such a case establishes that you are owed money; it does not create money to pay you.
