The current Managing Director of Evaly Mahbub Kabir Milon recently said that they will need permission from the High Court to make a server app to examine details of customers.
Mahbub Kabir Milon was appointed as ex-officio managing director of the infamous platform by the High Court in October last year.
In a recent Facebook post, Milon said that it would not be possible to return consumers’ money that has been stuck with the platform without access to the servers.
According to the social media post, without examining and cross-checking consumer records through a server app, it cannot be concluded if any claims have validity or not, for example, if delivery of a product is actually pending, or whether claims are being made even though the product was delivered.
The post further stated that the refund process was halted following the arrest of its former top brass Rassel as refund requests to the payment gateways that held the money in the escrow accounts were stopped as per the directive of the government.
Milon also said that the current panel had met with payment gateways on many occasions to return consumer money. However, the payment gateways explained that they were unable to verify the information of several customers through random sampling. The current board also does not have any information or documents of customers based on which they could prepare refund orders.
As all the information is preserved in the server, a server app would be required for doing the job. At the same time, some former officials have to be hired, said Milon, also an additional secretary of the government.
Evaly’s former top brass including Chairman Shamima Nasrin and its CEO Mohammad Rassel was ordered to give their server passwords by the High Court in November of last year.
The High Court bench of Justice Muhammad Khurshid Alam Sarkar ordered the former top brass for providing passwords to Mahbub Kabir Milon, the court-appointed managing director of Evaly.
Prior to that, in a Facebook post from Evaly’s verified page, the digital commerce platform stated that its servers went down as it could not keep up with the maintenance cost citing the temporary halt of banking activities with its CEO and chairman behind bars.
However, data from servers of the digital marketplace would be crucial to verify consumer claims, their liabilities, and other parts of the ongoing investigation.
“It is not easy to verify customer claims without access to the server and all documents,” Mohammad Sahab Uddin, vice president of the e-commerce Association of Bangladesh (e-CAB) told Dhaka Tribune.
“Access to servers should naturally be needed for consumer data which will help verify authorities of claims that have been made against Evaly. However, it is crucial to ensure data privacy so that consumer data is not misused,” the former president of Bangladesh Association of Software and Information Services (Basis) Syed Almas Kabir told Dhaka Tribune.
In this regard, the court directed jail authorities to facilitate the court-appointed managing director in recovering the passwords from the former chairman and CEO of the company who is behind bars in different cases filed over misappropriation.
The same High Court bench had also adjourned a petition filed by 30 consumers of the company to get back money worth Tk1.91 crore, asking them to approach the court-appointed board first.
