High taxes and interest rates stifle investment

Riad Mahmud, president of Bangladesh Association of Publicly Listed Companies, says 10% higher VAT demand punishes businesses

20 MIN(s) ago

Ahsan Habib

Riad Mahmud

The National Board of Revenue (NBR) seeks at least 10 percent higher value-added tax (VAT) collection from businesses each year, regardless of whether their sales grow, according to Riad Mahmud, president of the Bangladesh Association of Publicly Listed Companies (BAPLC). He said the practice has created a “double whammy” for manufacturers already strained by years of overlapping economic shocks.“It is common sense that revenue of many businesses dropped amid challenging situations,” he said. “Why would the government collect higher VAT even if the revenue of a company falls?Speaking in an interview with The Daily Star ahead of the upcoming budget for fiscal year 2026-27, Mahmud traced the current stress to an unusual sequence of shocks, each arriving before companies had recovered from the last.