A Financial Times documentary investigating vast capital flight, banking-sector capture and politically connected wealth during Sheikh Hasina’s rule has been named a finalist for the 2026 AIBs, bringing renewed international attention to one of the most consequential investigations into Bangladesh’s recent economic history.

Bangladesh’s Missing Billions, Stolen in Plain Sight, released in September 2025, examines how enormous sums of money allegedly left Bangladesh during Hasina’s 15 years in power, the systems that enabled those flows, and the difficult effort to trace and recover assets abroad.

The film has now been shortlisted in the Video – International Affairs Documentary category of the 2026 AIBs, alongside productions from major international broadcasters.

Organised by the UK-based Association for International Broadcasting, the AIBs have recognised international journalism and factual programming since 2005. The 2026 winners will be announced at a gala dinner at the Park Hyatt London River Thames on 20 November.

The film grew out of extensive FT reporting into Bangladesh’s banking system, politically connected business groups, overseas property holdings and alleged money laundering.

At the center of the documentary is an estimate in an economic white paper commissioned after Hasina’s fall, which calculated that roughly $234bn in illicit financial outflows left Bangladesh between 2009 and 2023.

The figure estimates illicit outflows rather than a judicial finding that identified individuals stole the entire amount. But its scale, alongside investigations into banks, powerful conglomerates and overseas assets, has made capital flight one of the defining economic questions of Bangladesh’s post-Hasina period.

The documentary goes beyond the headline number to examine how money may have moved: through bank takeovers, questionable lending, trade misinvoicing, and inflated import invoices, before appearing in overseas assets and property.

In October 2024, Ahsan H Mansur, then governor of Bangladesh Bank, told the FT that politically connected business groups had siphoned an estimated $17bn from the country’s banking system, describing how political influence, bank control and questionable lending had contributed to the problem.

The FT also investigated the international property holdings of former land minister Saifuzzaman Chowdhury, identifying hundreds of properties across several countries, including the UK. Chowdhury has denied wrongdoing and said his overseas wealth came from legitimate businesses established outside Bangladesh.

The FT’s work has formed part of a wider body of international reporting examining where Bangladesh’s wealth went during the Hasina years. Al Jazeera’s Investigative Unit went undercover for its 2024 documentary The Minister’s Millions, tracing former land minister Saifuzzaman Chowdhury’s extensive property holdings across Britain, Dubai and the US; Chowdhury has denied wrongdoing and said his wealth came from legitimate overseas businesses. 

The Guardian and Observer, working with Transparency International, subsequently identified a UK property portfolio worth almost £400mn linked to businesspeople and former officials associated with the Hasina-era establishment.

At the same time, OCCRP has separately traced previously undisclosed New York property holdings of politically connected Bangladeshi figures. Reuters has also followed the official response, reporting in January 2025 that Bangladesh Bank had hired EY, Deloitte and KPMG to audit banks alleged to have lost about $17bn and had established joint investigative teams to trace and recover assets.

Missing Billions brings those strands of reporting together into a single visual record, tracing the story from Bangladesh’s banks and political institutions to overseas financial and property markets.

The film was made during an extraordinary political transition.

Hasina fled Bangladesh on 5 August 2024, after student-led protests grew into a nationwide uprising amid a deadly crackdown. An interim government headed by Nobel laureate Muhammad Yunus subsequently took office and made financial-sector reform and the recovery of allegedly siphoned assets key priorities.

The documentary was filmed in 2025, during the Yunus administration.

That timing matters for the appearance of Ahsan H Mansur, who was the serving Bangladesh Bank governor during filming. He was therefore speaking not retrospectively, but as the official directly involved in confronting the banking-sector crisis and early asset-recovery efforts.

The documentary combines that institutional perspective with journalists, economists, anti-corruption specialists, and participants in the 2024 uprising, capturing both the political rupture and the financial reckoning that followed.

The Bangladesh production itself also relied heavily on local journalists and filmmakers.

Bangladeshi journalist and FT reporter Redwan Ahmed worked as a researcher-producer on the documentary, while Bangladeshi cinematographer Salman Saeed served as one of the directors of photography.

For Redwan, the film's significance lies partly in bringing months of fragmented investigations into a single historical record.

“For me, this was never only about a staggering number,” Redwan said. “It was about documenting how a system worked — how political power, banks, businesses and the movement of money across borders could intersect, and what that ultimately meant for Bangladesh.”

“The Financial Times had been reporting different parts of this story for months. The film allowed us to bring those threads together — the investigations, the people who lived through the political change, and the officials trying to understand what had happened and whether any of the money could be brought back.”

That archival value has only grown with time.

Bangladesh has since moved from the Yunus-led interim administration to an elected BNP government under Prime Minister Tarique Rahman. Still, efforts to trace and recover allegedly siphoned assets have continued.

That process is likely to take years. Once money crosses borders, authorities must establish ownership, reconstruct transactions and meet the legal standards of foreign jurisdictions before assets can be returned.

The documentary therefore captures the beginning of a reckoning whose outcome remains unresolved.

It records Bangladesh at a moment when the country was beginning to ask not simply how much money had left, but how the institutions meant to protect the economy had allowed it to happen.

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