The Anti-Corruption Commission (Amendment) Ordinance, 2025 was a substantive institutional

reform. It created a seven-member search committee for ACC commissioner appointments: chaired

by a senior Appellate Division justice, with participation from the High Court, the

Comptroller and Auditor General, the Public Service Commission chairman, one MP from the

ruling party, one MP from the opposition, and an expert with at least 15 years of

anti-corruption experience. The committee would have invited public applications, shortlisted

candidates, conducted interviews, and recommended two names per vacancy to the President.

The design directly addressed the ACC's deepest structural vulnerability: that whoever

controls commissioner appointments controls the commission. Under the prior system, the

executive held unchecked appointment authority. The ordinance would have diluted that control

through an independent, multi-stakeholder process.

When Bangladesh's parliament first sat on March 12, 2026, following the BNP's general

election victory and Prime Minister Tarique Rahman's February 17 swearing-in, the

constitutional clock started. Ordinances must be tabled within 30 days or they lapse. The

BNP government declined to introduce the ACC ordinance as a bill. By early April 2026, it

was gone.

BNP's Contradition

The BNP's stated objection was that the search committee composition curtailed the

government's authority over commissioner appointments. This rationale inverts the reform

logic. An ACC whose commissioners are selected without political gatekeeping is one that can

credibly investigate politically connected figures. An ACC whose commissioners are appointed

by the government whose principals it might need to investigate is structurally compromised.

The contradiction is not merely logical but textual. BNP's own 31-point State Reform

Outline, its electoral manifesto, and the July Charter it endorsed all included commitments

to reform ACC law and ensure the commission's independence. Allowing the ordinance to lapse

is a documented reversal of a written commitment made weeks before taking office.

TIB's Assessment

Transparency International Bangladesh convened a press conference on March 5, 2026, before

the ordinance had formally lapsed, to flag the risk. TIB's strategic priorities document

called restoring and strengthening the search committee provision "the most urgent need of

the hour" for anti-corruption governance under the new government. TIB also called on the

government to proactively disclose which interim-government ordinances it intended to convert

to law and which it planned to allow to lapse, a transparency standard the government has

not met.

TIB's broader point is structural: without visible anti-corruption commitment in the first

months, no subsequent pledge carries credibility. Reform momentum is hardest to rebuild once

lost.

The CPI Reading

Bangladesh's Corruption Perceptions Index 2025 score of 24 out of 100 -- ranked 150th

among 182 countries -- captures a decade of structural stagnation. The score has moved

between 24 and 28 since 2015. South Asian peers: India 38, Sri Lanka 34, Pakistan 27.

Southeast Asian peers: Vietnam 40, Indonesia 37. Bangladesh sits 21 points below the

Asia-Pacific regional average of 45.

CPI measures perceived corruption by business and country experts; it does not measure

prosecution outcomes directly. But it is the benchmark that foreign investors, multilateral

lenders, and rating agencies use. A BNP government that campaigns on anti-corruption reform

and then repeals the primary institutional mechanism for that reform is unlikely to move the

CPI needle.

High-Profile Cases and the Institutional Test

The credibility of the ACC's ongoing high-profile investigations depends on its institutional

independence. As of May 2026, the ACC has active cases against Salman F Rahman -- 11 cases

covering an estimated Tk 28.57 billion in alleged embezzlement and money laundering -- and

the BSEC has initiated a probe into S Alam (Saiful Alam Masud). These are the most

politically significant corruption cases in Bangladesh since the 2024 uprising.

If the ACC's commissioners are appointed through a process controlled by the executive, the

question of whether these investigations are conducted or concluded to political specification

cannot be dismissed. The absence of a transparent appointment mechanism is not a procedural

technicality; it is the condition under which the most sensitive cases will be decided.

The Conviction Rate Signal

ACC filed 451 cases in 2024, a five-year high, largely targeting figures affiliated with the

Awami League era. But the conviction rate fell to 47 percent in 2024, the lowest in eight

years, down from 72 percent in 2020. The divergence between case volume and conviction

quality is a governance signal. Filing cases without securing convictions neither punishes

wrongdoing nor deters future corruption; it creates a paper record of activity while the

underlying culture persists.

Quality of investigation -- which depends on investigator training, prosecutorial

preparation, and judicial capacity -- cannot be separated from the quality of institutional

leadership. Institutional leadership depends on how commissioners are selected.

What a Genuine Reform Would Require

The search committee ordinance lapsed as a standalone amendment. A successor framework

needs three components. First, statutory grounding of the search committee mechanism --

preferably through a permanent Act rather than another ordinance, to prevent a repeat of

the lapse. Second, explicit exclusion of serving government officials from the appointment

pathway during cases involving politically connected defendants. Third, a public reporting

requirement: the ACC should publish annual case-outcome statistics disaggregated by

defendant category, so that conviction-rate trends are attributable and assessable.

Without these, the 22-year institution continues operating in the same structural ambiguity

that has kept Bangladesh's CPI score essentially flat since 2015.