Police yesterday found JKG Health Care documents which showed that Dr Sabrina Arif Chowdhury was the convener of the organisation and not its chairman.
The Detective Branch (DB) of police, which is now investigating the case, said they will submit the charge sheet very soon in JKG’s Covid-19 test report scam case.
“We did not find any documents where it said Sabrina was the JKG chairman. But we found documents where it showed her as the convener,” Abdul Baten, additional commissioner of DB, told a press briefing at the DMP Media Centre yesterday.
JKG Health Care, a sister concern of Oval Group, started its journey in 2015 as a non-profit organisation.
An official order issued by Oval Group on June 13 and signed by its CEO Ariful Chaudhury, said Sabrina and three others were no longer a part of the group. The letter stated Sabrina as the chairman of Oval Group.
After her arrest on July 12, the health ministry suspended Sabrina from her post as registrar (cardiac surgery) at the National Institute of Cardiovascular Diseases for holding a position at a private organisation while being a government employee.
One month after the Covid-19 outbreak began the country in March, JKG got the approval from the Directorate General of Health Services (DGHS) on April 6 and started collecting samples for free at their 44 kiosks installed in Dhaka, Narayanganj and other places.
However, the scam surfaced on June 24 after Tejgaon police arrested six employees of Oval Group, including the CEO Ariful Chaudhury, over their alleged involvement in issuing fake Covid-19 test reports.
It was found during police investigation that the organisation started collecting samples from homes in exchange for money despite having no trade licence or the permission to do so. The test results of the samples collected from homes were found to be fake, police said.
When JKG had gotten the job of collecting samples for Covid-19 at their testing booths back in April, the DGHS didn’t check for its licence.
Just a week before the fake test report scam surfaced, JKG Health Care got a trade licence from Dhaka North City Corporation on June 16 under the business category of health services and consultancy, the police probe found.
DB yesterday went to the DGHS to verify information and documents regarding JKG Health Care. There, they spoke to Prof Dr Nasima Sultana, additional director general (administration) of the DGHS and Aminul Hasan, the outgoing director (hospital and clinic) over the issue. The DB stayed there from 1:30pm to 4:30pm.
“We went there [DGHS] to verify the information we obtained from Sabrina and Arif, and also the JKG documents,” said a DB official, preferring anonymity.
Prof Nasima said the DB team wanted to know about JKG’s documents. “We provided the information they needed…They wanted documents we have with JKG,” she said.
DB officials further said that Dr Nasima told them that she had informed the director general of DGHS about the JKG issue but he did not take any action in this regard, adding that they would call the recently resigned DG to their office for further information on JKG.
The DB said JKG was supposed to open another branch in Chattogram.
“Almost everything was finalised in this regard,” said an investigator. ❑
The Daily Star
