At least six out of the 49 members of the newly-formed cabinet are facing criminal charges, according to their affidavits placed with the Election Commission.
Those six include ministers Tofayel Ahmed, Engineer Mosharrof Hossain, Hasanul Haque Inu and Anwar Hossain Manju. Among them, Manju is facing the highest of three graft charges, while the remaining three ministers have one charge each.
Of the remaining 23 ministers, 15 have faced charges before but are not facing any right now, while eight of them have clean sheets.
The other two facing charges are state ministers Moshiur Rahman Ranga and Mirza Azam. Other than these two, M Mujibul Haque, Narayan Chandra Chanda, Biren Shikder and Junaid Ahmed Polok have faced charges before but do not have any right now. The rest of the 11 state ministers have never faced any charges.
Out of the two deputy ministers, Abdullah Al Islam Jacob has no charge against him right now, while no case has ever been filed against Arif Khan Joy, according to their affidavits.
However, the number of cases that the members of the cabinet mentioned in their affidavits would have been much higher had the government not withdrawn many which they deemed to be politically motivated.
According to home ministry officials, the Scrutiny Committee for Recommending Withdrawal of Politically Motivated Cases withdrew a total of 7,101 cases, including 345 filed by the Anti-Corruption Commission, out of the 11,113 applications they had received in the last four years.
The government decided to withdraw 72 more cases filed between 2001 and 2006 in August last year, identifying them as politically motivated and aimed at harassing the then opposition leaders and activists.
