BANGLADESH – Bangladesh’s central bank chief resigned on Tuesday, after hackers stole $81 million from the nation’s foreign reserves in one of the biggest bank heists in history, the finance minister said.

The audacious cyber-theft has embarrassed the government, triggered outrage in the impoverished country and raised alarm over the security of the country’s foreign exchange reserves of over $27 billion.

On Tuesday the finance minister said Atiur Rahman had stood down at his request, after revealing that the Bangladesh Bank governor failed to inform authorities of the theft for a month.

“He called me yesterday and I’ve asked him to resign. And he has resigned today,” minister A.M.A. Muhith told AFP, adding that the government has ordered a probe into the heist.

Two of the bank’s deputy governors were also sacked after the government vowed a major shake up of the institution’s top management, Muhith told reporters.

On February 5, the hackers stole $81 million from an account that Bangladesh held with the Federal Reserve Bank of New York and transferred the cash electronically to accounts in the Philippines.

They attempted to steal almost $1 billion and were only prevented from taking more because of a basic typing error, the Bangladesh Bank’s deputy governor told AFP last week.

Before his resignation, an emotional Rahman said he was alarmed by the hack but did not comment on why he took so long to report the missing money.

“This event was almost like a militant attack, almost like an earthquake. I did not realise how it happened, from where it originated and who had done it,” he said, choking back tears.

“When I was informed I was so puzzled. Fearing that it might destroy our economy, I quickly took opinion of the experts. I brought them to the country from abroad and ensured security so that it did not occur again.” Rahman, a 64-year-old economist and former university professor, was appointed as the governor of the Bangladesh Bank in 2009 and had been due to retire in August.

As details of the scandal emerged last week, he flew to India to attend an International Monetary Fund meeting, leaving junior central bank officials scrambling to explain how the hackers managed to take such large sums.

Some of the funds have been recovered and Filipino authorities have frozen the stolen money following court orders, Bangladesh Bank has said. It suspects the hackers were Chinese.

The thieves, who bombarded the New York bank with dozens of transfer requests, had been attempting to steal a further $850 million, but the bank’s security systems and typing errors in some requests prevented the full theft.

The hack took place on a Friday, when Bangladesh Bank is closed, while the Federal Reserve Bank in New York is closed on Saturday and Sunday.

The US reserve bank, which manages the Bangladesh Bank reserve account, denied its own systems were breached.

The $81 million was transferred to four accounts at the Filipino Rizal Commercial Banking Corporation (RCBC) – and then transferred to an account belonging to ethnic Chinese businessman William So Go, a Senate inquiry in the Philippines heard.

Go then transferred the money to Filipino casinos, Julia Bacay-Abad from the Philippines’ anti-money laundering council told the hearing on Tuesday.

Go’s lawyer said the businessman’s signatures for his now-frozen RCBC account, which were used to transfer the money, had been forged.

Rahman launched a series of populist policies to take bank services to the doorstep of millions of rural poor in Bangladesh.

But his tenure was marred by a spate of high-profile banking scams in which state-owned banks lost hundreds of millions of dollars in bad loans.

On Tuesday he said authorities were still mystified by the attack as he defended his decision to delay informing the government. He added that making the news public earlier would have risked tipping off the hackers.

“I don’t deny that I took time (to inform the finance minister). It was a cyber attack and even today we don’t know from where it originated,” he said.

MYANMAR – Myanmar’s next president may be little known outside his homeland but for Aung San Suu Kyi, who plucked her schoolfriend and longtime aide from the political sidelines to be her proxy, it is Htin Kyaw’s loyalty that is paramount.

The 69-year-old was comfortably elected Myanmar’s first civilian president since 1962 on Tuesday, a position he will hold in place of the Nobel laureate who is banned from top office by the army-drafted constitution.

The son of a revered poet who has helped run Suu Kyi’s charitable foundation in recent years, Htin Kyaw is billed as someone with a high level of education, personal standing and absolute trustworthiness to “The Lady”.

Yet he remains an unknown and untested quantity with many asking how much influence he will wield over a government he will only nominally lead and in a complex political system where the military still wields considerable influence.

Suu Kyi has pledged to pull the strings of power from “above” her appointee, though in this delicate and secretive transition, she has not revealed how the arrangement will work.

Dawn of a new era in Myanmar as Aung San Suu Kyi’s party takes over

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AFP, Reuters

But Htin Kyaw’s appointment suggests she thinks he has sufficient pedigree in the country’s long struggle against junta rule to be embraced by the millions of voters who swept to the polls in November to validate her star power and simple message of change.

He is believed to have joined the party last year – although the NLD has not confirmed exactly when.

Nonetheless the soft-spoken economics graduate’s life has been entwined with Myanmar’s democracy struggle and Suu Kyi’s movement.

His father Min Thu Wun, was a national poet and early NLD member while his wife Su Su Lwin is a sitting party MP whose late father was once party spokesman.

“He’s not just anybody, he comes from a very political family,” Bertil Lintner, a veteran Myanmar commentator told AFP.

His inner circle closeness to Suu Kyi was illustrated in 2010 when the Nobel Laureate was finally released from years of house arrest.

As she greeted jubilant crowds from behind the gate of her crumbling Yangon mansion, Htin Kyaw stood to her right.

During those heady but often unsure times when Suu Kyi remained under intense military scrutiny, he could sometimes be seen at the wheel of her car, shuttling her between high-level meetings.

For the last four years he has been a senior executive in Suu Kyi’s charity, which provides development aid and skills training to her Kawhmu constituency and other areas of the impoverished country.

In an interview with AFP about the charity’s work in July 2015, Htin Kyaw spoke of the steep climb Myanmar faced to claw its way out of poverty.

“You see that we are doing a lot, which means we need a lot. We are just doing only a very small portion of what is required for the nation,” he said.

Born in 1946, Htin Kyaw earned a masters degree in 1968 from the Yangon Economics University and went on to complete further courses abroad, including in the UK, the US and Japan.

According to an official biography released by the Daw Khin Kyi Foundation, he studied at the University of London’s Institute of Computer Science from 1971 to 72.

In a varied career he worked as a university teacher and also held positions in the finance and national planning and foreign affairs ministries in the late 1970s and 80s before retiring from government service as the military tightened its grip.

BANGKOK – Thai police charged two executives of a fire safety company with negligence Tuesday after a malfunctioning extinguisher system killed eight people inside a Bangkok bank Sunday night.

The accident happened while contract workers were upgrading the chemical fire extinguisher system in the basement of the headquarters of Siam Commercial Bank, one of the country’s largest financial institutions.

The bank said the contractors mistakenly set the system off, releasing a chemical retardant designed to starve any fire of oxygen.

Seven of those killed were contractors while the eighth victim was a bank security guard.

On Tuesday police charged two executives from Megaplanet, a company contracted by the bank that outsourced the work to a third outfit.

“Police explained the charge of negligence resulting in deaths to both suspects,” said Bangkok’s city police commander Sanit Mahathavorn.

The executives, Adisorn Phoka and Napong Suksa-nguan, could face up to ten years in prison.

Sanit said police are still investigating how the system was triggered and why victims were seemingly unable to escape the thick cloud of chemicals.

Photos published by local media showed rescue workers battling a smoky haze to reach the victims, five of whom were killed at the scene.

Bodies were brought out wrapped in white blankets while paramedics could be seen trying to resuscitate victims on the pavement.

Seven injured are still receiving medical attention at a hospital, according to Bangkok’s Erawan emergency medical centre.

The bank expressed sympathy for the victims in a statement Monday and said the rest of the building was unaffected and operating normally.