The ministry in an unprecedented move has held the chairman of the state telecoms monopoly personally responsible for the fraud.

The ministry in its investigation found that BTTB Chairman Mohammad Nurul Islam overstepped his authority and camouflaged multimillion-dollar overpayment provision in the name of "Post Guarantee Maintenance Assistance" in the mobile telephone contract with Chinese Huawei and German Siemens on June 14.

Both vendors were originally bound to provide the service for maintenance of equipment free of cost. Accordingly, the government approved the $76 million mobile telephone purchase proposal in favour of Huawei and Siemens.

The chairman, however, tampered with the approval and inserted a dubious clause in the contracts with Huawei ($35 million) and Siemens ($41 million) that relieves the vendors of rendering the free service, says a ministry probe report.

The national exchequer has to pay $500,000 to Siemens and $2,353,820 to Huawei a year for maintaining BTTB's mobile network for 13 years because of the newly inserted clause. The total payable now stands in excess of $37 million, the report adds.

The BTTB chairman "defied all evaluation reports, recommendations, confirmations, approvals and MoU" while exempting Huawei and Siemens from rendering free "Post Guarantee Maintenance Assistance Service", according to the probe report.

The ministry has personally accused the BTTB chairman of going beyond his jurisdiction and tampering with the official approval of the contracts. The ministry issued a letter on November 24 by name to the BTTB chairman to immediately comment on the ministry's allegations. Nurul is yet to reply.

The Daily Star ran an uncontested report on October 30 exposing this scandalous multimillion dollars deal, which has evidently prompted the telecoms ministry to investigate the matter.