BB seeks account info of Alesha Mart, 10 other online merchants
The Bangladesh Financial Intelligence Unit (BFIU) of the central bank has sought bank account details of 11 e-commerce merchants, including the Alesha Mart.
The online merchants are- Alesha Mart, Dhamaka Shop, Sirajganj Shop, Aladiner Prodip, Boom Boom, Adyen Mart, Needs, QCoom, Dalal Plus, EOrange and Bajaj Collection.
BFIU, in a notice on Tuesday, asked the banks to send detailed information of seven online merchants' bank accounts within a week. Earlier on 23 June, BFIU asked for information of four more platforms.
Recently, several banks including Prime Bank, Mutual Trust Bank (MTU), Brac Bank and Bank Asia suspended card transactions with these seven online shops along with Evaly and E-orange.
The fresh action of the central bank came in the wake of recent report on another e-commerce company Evaly.
In a recent report, Bangladesh Bank said, Evaly's ever-increasing liabilities caused by a reportedly flawed business strategy – unusually high discounts in products and cashback offers incurring huge losses – has exposed it to the risk of collapse.
According to an inspection report of the central bank, Evaly's liabilities to customers and merchants have risen to Tk403.80 crore, while its current asset is only Tk65.17 crore.
The report says till 14 March this year, Evaly did not deliver products against a cumulative sum of Tk213.94 crore in advance payments from customers. Moreover, the company owes Tk189.85 crore to the merchants from whom it bought products.
In other words, with all its current assets, Evaly can repay only 16.14% of its total liabilities or only one-third of the liabilities to the customers.
The total number of customers of Evaly as of 28 February this year was 44,85,234. Including the cancellation of the purchase orders, cashbacks given by Evaly and sold gift cards, an e-value to the tune of Tk73.39 crore was stored in Evaly's virtual IDs (account, holding, gift card, cashback) of these customers. But at the end of that very day, Evaly.com Limited had a total deposit of Tk2.04 crore in its 10 bank accounts.
