Country's foreign currency reserves reached a new high yesterday, hitting $22.46 billion on the back of resurgence in exports in the past couple of months. Last month, exports raked in $2.84 billion, up 4.41 percent year-on-year, according to an official from the commerce ministry, whose sub-division Export Promotion Bureau logs in export data. Exports raked in $2.42 billion in November last year. December’s figure takes the total export earnings in the first half of fiscal 2014-15 to $14.91 billion, a slight improvement of 1.56 percent...

Tax authorities will install ‘data forensic laboratory’ next month to detect tax evasion through paperless accounts system of the corporate taxpayers. The lab is set to start its operation from February at the Central Intelligence Cell (CIC) with advance devices that are capable of detecting concealment of electronically maintained accounts information of the corporate houses. Taxmen are currently conducting assessment under manual system due to the absence of modern equipments to find out mismatch and irregularities in electronically maintained financial records, FE reports.

Bangladesh’s annual inflation in December eased for a fifth straight month to its lowest level in more than two years, but price pressures could climb again on renewed political unrest. The consumer price index in December fell to 6.11 percent from a year earlier, the lowest since October 2012, from 6.21 percent in November, officials at the Bangladesh Bureau of Statistics said on Tuesday. Food prices were 5.86 percent higher than a year earlier in December, lower than November’s 6.44 percent rise. In contrast, non-food inflatio...

Bangladesh Bank on Monday said scheduled banks would have to deposit in the central bank three per cent fund of their undisbursed farm loans against their target amount for a certain financial year in a bid to speed up the BB’s agriculture loan disbursement programme. The BB issued a circular to managing directors and chief executive officers of all banks saying that the central bank would repay the three per cent fund to the respective banks if they distribute the undisbursed amount with their fresh targets for the next financial year. The central bank will not...