Salman F. Rahman: Beximco and the Fortune Fused to the State

If Muhammad Yunus is the Bangladeshi businessman the world chose to celebrate, Salman F. Rahman is the one it learned to scrutinise. For decades he was the country's most powerful private-sector figure: co-founder of the sprawling Beximco conglomerate, a fixture of the Dhaka establishment, and — most consequentially — the private-industry adviser, with cabinet rank, to Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina. He embodied a particular and globally recognisable model of wealth: the businessman whose fortunes rise and fall with the government he is tied to. When that government fell in 2024, so, dramatically, did he. His story is the clearest case study in this series of the promise and the peril of building an empire on political proximity.

It must be told carefully, because Rahman is, at the time of writing, facing serious criminal charges that have not been adjudicated. The presumption of innocence is not a courtesy here; it is the discipline that separates journalism from the score-settling that often follows a regime's collapse. What can be stated as fact is the arc — the rise alongside Hasina and the fall after her — and the documented mix of genuine industrial achievement and long-standing controversy that defined the years in between.

Building Beximco

Salman Fazlur Rahman was born on 23 May 1951 in Dohar, near Dhaka. He was educated at Notre Dame College, studied physics at the University of Dhaka, and graduated from the University of Karachi — a cosmopolitan, well-connected upbringing in the late years of united Pakistan, on the eve of Bangladesh's violent birth in 1971.

In 1972, in the immediate aftermath of independence, Salman and his elder brother A. S. F. (Ahmed Sohail Fasiur) Rahman founded Bangladesh Export Import Company — Beximco. The timing was shrewd: a brand-new nation needed builders, and the brothers set out to be among the most ambitious. Over the following decades Beximco grew into one of Bangladesh's largest private-sector conglomerates, with a genuinely broad industrial footprint: pharmaceuticals, textiles and garments, ceramics, jute, energy, financial services, and media. The crown jewel, Beximco Pharmaceuticals, founded in 1976, became a real success story, manufacturing generic medicines, exporting to dozens of countries, and becoming the first Bangladeshi company to list on the London Stock Exchange's Alternative Investment Market. In 1982 the brothers co-founded AB Bank, one of the country's first private banks. This was not a paper empire; Beximco built factories, employed tens of thousands, and put Bangladeshi pharmaceuticals on the global map. That achievement is real and should not be erased by what came later.

The politics that powered the empire

What made Salman F. Rahman more than a successful industrialist was politics. He was a long-standing and senior figure in the Awami League, the party Sheikh Hasina led to dominance, and he served as an Awami League member of parliament. In 2019 Hasina appointed him her adviser on private industry and investment, a position carrying the rank of a cabinet minister. For the final stretch of the Hasina era, in other words, one of the country's biggest private businessmen sat formally inside the government, advising on exactly the policies that shaped the environment his own conglomerate operated in.

This is the structural heart of the Salman F. Rahman story, and it does not require any specific allegation to be troubling. When a major industrialist is also a senior government adviser, the line between public interest and private advantage becomes inherently blurred, regardless of any individual's intentions. Critics across Bangladeshi civil society and the political opposition long described Rahman as the archetypal "crony" of the Hasina government — the embodiment of an economy in which the biggest business successes were inseparable from political access. Long before 2024, Beximco-linked companies were reported to carry very large bank borrowings, and a leaked 2007 US diplomatic cable had named Rahman among major bank-loan defaulters. None of this was, in itself, proof of crime; much of it was the ordinary, legal machinery of a politically connected conglomerate. But it built, over years, a public image of a man whose empire and whose government were two faces of one coin.

The market-crash shadow — and an acquittal

It is worth correcting a common misconception about Rahman's history, because precision matters. The most serious market-related allegations against him stem not from the 1990s but from the catastrophic 2010–11 collapse of the Dhaka and Chittagong stock exchanges, which wiped out the savings of huge numbers of small investors. A government-appointed inquiry committee, led by the respected former central banker Khondkar Ibrahim Khaled, examined the crash, and Rahman's name featured prominently in the surrounding controversy and the cases that followed.

Here the discipline of accuracy cuts in his favour: Rahman was acquitted, with the relevant cases dismissed around 2015. Whatever the public suspicion, the legal system did not convict him in connection with the market crash. An honest account states the allegation, the investigation, and the acquittal with equal clarity, and resists the temptation to let an unproven association harden into assumed guilt. The crash devastated ordinary Bangladeshis and the search for villains was intense; that is precisely the environment in which the presumption of innocence matters most.

The fall

Then the ground gave way. In the summer of 2024, the student-led uprising toppled Sheikh Hasina, and the protective canopy over her closest business allies vanished overnight. On 13 August 2024, Salman F. Rahman was arrested — reportedly detained at a Dhaka river port, in circumstances the new authorities described as an attempt to flee the country.

What followed was the familiar post-regime reckoning. Rahman was shown arrested in multiple cases brought by the Anti-Corruption Commission relating to alleged banking-sector corruption; investigators announced they would press charges in a series of money-laundering cases involving allegations of tens of millions of dollars moved through trade-based schemes; and authorities reported seizing substantial assets linked to him. Bail was, through 2025, repeatedly denied.

Every one of those 2024–25 matters is, at the time of writing, an allegation and a pending case — not a conviction. This is the crucial editorial line. There is a real and legitimate question about whether Rahman, as one of the most powerful beneficiaries of a fallen and frequently corrupt order, engaged in wrongdoing; there is an equally real risk that a new government, riding revolutionary momentum, pursues the old regime's symbols with more zeal than due process. Both risks are genuine. The responsible reader treats the arrest and charges as documented facts, the guilt as unproven, and the eventual verdicts — whenever they come — as the thing that will actually settle the question.

The breadth of the empire

To understand both the achievement and the controversy, it helps to grasp just how wide Beximco's footprint became, because the conglomerate was not a one-product company that got lucky. It was a sprawling industrial group whose interests touched a remarkable share of the Bangladeshi economy, and that breadth is itself part of the story — both as evidence of genuine entrepreneurial reach and as the reason its rise and fall mattered so much to so many people.

The most visible pillar was textiles and garments, the engine of Bangladesh's modern export economy. Beximco built a large vertically integrated textile and apparel operation, the kind of manufacturing base that put Bangladesh on the world's clothing map and employed enormous numbers of workers. Alongside it sat a ceramics business making tableware and tiles for both the domestic market and export. The group moved into energy, including ventures in power generation and renewable solar projects — the sort of capital-intensive infrastructure that, in Bangladesh as elsewhere, tends to require close dealings with the state that licenses and buys the output. There were interests in financial services, construction, and information technology. And Beximco was a significant presence in media, owning Independent Television and the English-language newspaper The Independent — assets that, in any country, give an industrialist a degree of influence over public discourse that pure manufacturing never could, and that sit uneasily alongside a senior government role.

The point of cataloguing the breadth is not to marvel at it but to see what it meant. A conglomerate this diversified, in a developing economy, inevitably brushes up against the government at a dozen points: licences, tariffs, energy contracts, bank credit, regulatory approvals, spectrum, land. The wider the empire, the more numerous the touchpoints between private interest and public authority — and the more salient the question of whether a man who sat inside the government could keep those two roles cleanly apart. Beximco's very success made the conflict-of-interest concern larger, not smaller. That is the structural reading, and it stands regardless of any individual transaction's legality.

Covishield: the pandemic and the politics of access

No single episode captures the promise and the unease of Salman F. Rahman's position more sharply than what happened during the COVID-19 pandemic. In early 2021, as the world scrambled for vaccines, Beximco Pharmaceuticals became the local distributor in Bangladesh for the Oxford-AstraZeneca vaccine manufactured by the Serum Institute of India under the brand name Covishield. In a country of well over a hundred million people facing a deadly pandemic, the company that handled the import and distribution of the nation's first major vaccine supply was performing one of the most critical public-health functions imaginable.

There are two honest ways to read this, and a fair account holds them together. On one reading, it was a logical commercial fit: Beximco Pharmaceuticals was among the country's largest and most capable pharmaceutical operations, with the regulatory experience, cold-chain logistics, and Indian commercial relationships to move vaccines at scale in a hurry — exactly the kind of moment a serious pharmaceutical company exists for. On the other reading, the optics were uncomfortable in a way that cannot be waved away: a politically connected firm, whose vice-chairman was the sitting prime minister's cabinet-rank industry adviser, landed the contract for the single most important medical product the country would buy that year. When a company tied so intimately to the government secures a critical national role during a crisis, the public is entitled to ask whether the assignment turned on capability, on connections, or on both — and to note that in a system where the two are fused, the question can rarely be answered cleanly. Reporting at the time also recorded friction over supply and pricing as India's own outbreak disrupted exports, which sharpened the scrutiny. None of this establishes wrongdoing; distributing vaccines in a pandemic is a legitimate and valuable function. But it is a textbook illustration of why the conflation of major private business with senior public office is corrosive to trust even when every individual decision is defensible. The vaccine reached people who needed it; the arrangement also showed exactly how political proximity converts into commercial position.

The conflict of interest, named plainly

It is worth stating the central structural problem in the plainest possible terms, because it is the throughline of the entire Salman F. Rahman story and it does not depend on any unproven allegation. For the final years of the Hasina era, the same person was, simultaneously, one of the largest private industrialists in Bangladesh and a cabinet-rank adviser inside the government that regulated, taxed, licensed, and lent to businesses like his own. Those two roles cannot be reconciled in principle. The job of a private industrialist is to advance the interests of his firms; the job of a government adviser is to advance the public interest. When one person holds both, every policy he touches carries an unanswerable question about whose interest it served, and every commercial success his firms enjoy invites the suspicion that access, not merit, produced it.

This is not a uniquely Bangladeshi failing — versions of it recur wherever business and political elites overlap — but Rahman's case is an unusually pure specimen because the dual role was formal and open rather than hidden. He was not a businessman secretly bribing officials; he was a businessman who had himself been made an official, with the rank of a minister. That openness is, in a strange way, the most revealing feature of all. It tells you about a political economy in which the fusion of wealth and power was not a scandal to be concealed but an arrangement to be institutionalised. The deepest critique of Salman F. Rahman, then, is not really about any one contract or loan or vaccine deal. It is that his career normalised the idea that the country's biggest businessman belonged inside its government — and that normalisation outlasts the verdict in any individual case.

The post-regime reckoning over Beximco

After Sheikh Hasina's government fell in 2024, the reckoning did not stop at Rahman's own arrest; it extended to the empire itself. Bangladeshi authorities under the new interim administration moved to take control of, and in cases to install receivers or government-appointed overseers over, companies linked to Beximco amid the investigations and cases that followed the regime's collapse. The interventions were framed by the authorities as steps to protect public and creditor interests — much of the conglomerate's structure was bound up with very large bank borrowings — while the investigations into alleged banking and money-laundering offences proceeded.

This phase has to be reported with the same care as the personal charges, and for the same reason. On one hand, where a conglomerate carried enormous state-bank debt and sat at the centre of corruption allegations, some form of official protective intervention is a normal and defensible response, intended to stop asset flight and preserve value for creditors and workers. On the other hand, the seizure and administration of a fallen insider's businesses by the very government that replaced his patron is exactly the kind of action that can blur, in practice, the line between lawful receivership and political expropriation. The thousands of employees across Beximco's textile mills, pharmaceutical plants, and other operations had committed no offence, and their livelihoods became hostage to a process driven by a national settling of accounts. The charges against Rahman and the actions against his companies are, at the time of writing, part of an unfinished post-regime reckoning whose fairness will be judged by whether it proceeds through due process or through revolutionary momentum. The empire that rose with the state is now being dismantled, or at least administered, by the state — and which of those it ultimately proves to be is, like the criminal cases, not yet settled.

The debt question, in proportion

A recurring thread in the public case against Rahman, long predating the 2024 collapse, concerns debt — specifically the very large bank borrowings carried by Beximco-linked companies, and the perception that a politically connected group could borrow on terms, and at a scale, that ordinary businesses could not. A leaked 2007 US diplomatic cable had named Rahman among major bank-loan defaulters in the country, a detail that critics returned to for years as shorthand for the privileges of proximity. After Hasina's fall, the size of the group's exposure to the banking system became central to the official actions taken against its companies.

It is important to keep this in proportion, in both directions. Heavy borrowing is, in itself, the ordinary condition of a large industrial conglomerate; building textile mills, power plants, and pharmaceutical factories is capital-intensive, and debt is how such things get built everywhere. A large loan book is not evidence of wrongdoing. At the same time, the legitimate concern is not the existence of the debt but the terms on which it was extended and whether political weight tilted those terms — whether a connected borrower enjoyed access, forbearance, or restructuring that an unconnected one would have been denied. That is a real question and a fair one, and it is precisely the kind of question that only a credible, due-process investigation can answer. Repeating the 2007 cable or the headline debt figures proves nothing on its own; it merely marks, again, the place where private advantage and public banking met. As with everything else in this story, the documented fact is the proximity, and the unproven part is the crime.

Two brothers, one company, and the shape of family capitalism

It is worth remembering that Beximco was never a solo creation, and that the family structure tells you something about how a great deal of South Asian capitalism actually works. Salman F. Rahman built the company alongside his elder brother, A. S. F. Rahman, and for decades the two ran the conglomerate together — a sibling partnership of the kind that anchors many of the largest business houses across the subcontinent, where the firm and the family are functionally the same entity and control passes within the bloodline rather than to outside managers or dispersed shareholders.

This family-house model has real strengths. It allows for long time horizons, fast decision-making, and a continuity of vision that quarterly-driven public companies struggle to match — qualities that helped Beximco commit to capital-intensive industries and ride out the volatility of a young, turbulent economy. But it also concentrates risk and reputation. When the family is the firm, the firm's fortunes rise and fall with the family's standing, and a legal or political assault on one prominent member becomes an existential threat to the entire enterprise and to the thousands of unrelated people it employs. That is exactly what played out after 2024: the troubles of the most politically exposed brother became the troubles of the whole group. The family-house structure that had powered Beximco's rise also meant there was no clean separation — no professional firewall between the controlling personalities and the operating businesses — to contain the damage when the political weather turned. It is a structural feature, not a verdict, but it is essential to understanding why the fall of one man could so quickly become the unwinding of an empire. The lesson generalises well beyond Bangladesh: where ownership, family, and political access all converge on a single set of personalities, the enterprise inherits not only their advantages but every one of their vulnerabilities, and the day of reckoning, when it arrives, arrives for all of it at once.

The honest verdict

Salman F. Rahman built something real. Beximco's factories, its pharmaceutical exports, its place as a pioneer of Bangladeshi industry — these are genuine accomplishments that long predated his most powerful political positions, and they will outlast his current troubles. To pretend he was nothing but a crony is to misunderstand both the man and the country he helped build.

But his career is, ultimately, the textbook illustration of the model this series keeps returning to in different forms: the fortune fused to the state. When your business and your government are intertwined for a generation, you capture the upside of that intimacy in good times and you cannot escape its downside when the regime collapses. Whatever the courts ultimately decide about the specific charges, the structural lesson is already clear and was clear long before 2024: an empire built on political proximity is only ever as secure as the politics. Yunus, the moral icon, was persecuted by the state and then handed it. Rahman, the consummate insider, rose with the state and then fell beneath it. Between them, the two most famous businessmen of modern Bangladesh map the same brutal truth from opposite ends — in this economy, as in so many, the most decisive business variable was never the balance sheet. It was who held power, and whether they were your friend.

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Editor's note: HustleMemo writes founder-led case studies grounded in public reporting. The 2024–25 criminal charges against the subject are reported as arrest and pending, unproven allegations; the 2010–11 market-crash matter ended in acquittal (2015). We name genuine business achievement and structural conflict-of-interest concerns separately. Corrections: editorial@hustlememo.com.

Sources

• "Salman F. Rahman," Wikipedia (born 23 May 1951 Dohar; Notre Dame College, University of Dhaka, University of Karachi; co-founded Beximco in 1972 with brother A.S.F. Rahman; Beximco Pharmaceuticals 1976; AB Bank 1982; Awami League MP; PM Hasina's private-industry adviser with cabinet rank, 2019–2024).
• Reporting on Beximco's scale and Beximco Pharmaceuticals' London AIM listing and pharmaceutical exports.
• The 2010–11 Dhaka/Chittagong stock-market crash, the Ibrahim Khaled inquiry, the cases naming Rahman, and his 2015 acquittal/dismissal.
• Reporting (The Business Standard, New Age, Sourcing Journal) on the 13 August 2024 arrest, the Anti-Corruption Commission cases, the announced money-laundering charges (~$97M), and asset seizures — all reported as pending, unproven allegations.
• The leaked 2007 US diplomatic cable naming Rahman among major bank-loan defaulters; reporting on Beximco-linked bank borrowings.