We Found Someone to Blame for the Banking Crisis. Her Name is Toma Mirza.

Toma Mirza has spent the better part of 15 years becoming one of the most recognizable faces in Bangladeshi entertainment. She debuted in 2010, won the National Film Award for Best Supporting Actress in 2015 for her role in Nodijon, and in the last few years has headlined Surongo and Daagi, two of the biggest box office successes Dhallywood has had in recent memory.

In a country of over 170 million people, there are very few faces more widely recognized than hers. That is not incidental to this story. It is, as we'll get to, the entire reason a bank wanted her.

That is the actress who took a job as Assistant Vice President in Brand and Communications at a bank, and Bangladesh decided this was the emergency of the week. Not the collapsed banks. Not the six lakh crore taka in bad loans sitting on the country's books. An actress took a desk job, and suddenly everyone had a strong opinion on what real banking competence looks like.

None of this is new, and pretending otherwise is the first dishonesty in this whole controversy. Anyone who grew up in Bangladesh in the 1980s and 90s watched this exact arrangement play out with sportspeople instead of actors.

Our footballer Aslam held a position at Sadharon Bima Corporation for years. Almost every major hockey player of that generation passed through Bangladesh Biman at some point in his career. Nobody assumed these men were underwriting insurance policies or managing an airline's cash flow between matches.

They were hired because their faces carried decades of public goodwill, and that goodwill was worth something real to the institutions that hired them. Nobody called it a scandal then, and the only real difference now is that the face doing the same job happens to belong to a woman.

Fine. Let's actually talk about banking competence, because nobody defending it seems to want to.

A bank is not simply a ledger with a building wrapped around it. Someone still has to convince a person with real savings to trust this institution over the one next door, and that has never been purely a ratios problem.

If you were about to move your life savings into a fixed deposit tomorrow, whose call are you actually taking: An officer whose name you have never heard, or a woman you have watched on your screen for close to 15 years and already feel some familiarity with? Most people know the honest answer even if they would rather not say it out loud.

It is also, by any reasonable estimate, a cheap bet for the bank. An actress at the peak of two consecutive box office hits could almost certainly command a far higher fee in film than an AVP's salary at any private bank in the country, so AB Bank is very likely getting one of the most bankable faces in the country's entertainment industry at a fraction of her market rate.

And AB Bank, of all banks, needs that trust more than most. Nearly 84% of its loan portfolio was classified as non-performing as of late 2025, among the worst ratios of any bank in the country. It closed 2024 with a capital shortfall of over four thousand crore taka and a net loss approaching two thousand crore, and its troubles trace back at least to a 2016 money laundering scandal.

This is the country's oldest private commercial bank, founded in 1981, now sitting on some of the worst numbers in the sector. Hiring a face the public already trusts is not vanity spending for an institution in that position. It reads more like triage.

But Toma does not have the right "credentials" for the job, you say? She never worked as a banker her entire career, is the crusading cry. And this is exactly the kind of thinking and logic that got us into this financial mess in the first place.

For decades our banking sector has been run by exactly the kind of people this controversy insists we need: Men with the right degrees, the right postings, decades spent climbing "the system," every promotion supposedly earned on real banking knowledge. So where did all that expertise actually take us?

As of March 2026, the non-performing loan ratio in Bangladesh's banking sector stood at 32.26%, according to the central bank's own figures. Roughly one in every three taka lent out by a bank in this country has gone bad. That works out to nearly six lakh crore taka that is unlikely to ever come back, and the number has been climbing for years, quietly, while boardrooms full of career bankers signed off on it.

A large chunk of that came down to one business group alone. The S Alam Group didn't slip past Bangladesh's professional banking class through some clever con.

It took control of seven banks with the backing of state intelligence agencies, and career bankers, officers and board members with every credential this controversy is demanding of Toma Mirza, approved loan renewals that breached the Bank Companies Act, waved through limits several times over legal ceilings, and looked away while roughly two lakh crore taka moved abroad through shell companies and hundi networks.

At one Islami Bank branch alone, staff reportedly helped withdraw close to two thousand crore taka in unrecorded cash over seven months. This is the largest banking scandal in the country's history, run entirely by men whose job title was supposedly proof of competence.

None of this suggests that a Dhallywood celebrity would have championed against the destruction of our banking system, by well, let’s face it, proper bankers.

But where is the outrage for them? Where is the Facebook thread interrogating the Assistant Vice President who signed off on a loan renewal he knew was fraudulent? Where is the demand to know what his marriage looks like, who he answers to at home, what his character must be like to have done this? Nobody asks.

His failure gets filed under "systemic," "political interference," "regulatory capture," real words, real causes, but also a very convenient shelter. A man can preside over the destruction of a bank and remain, in the public imagination, just an unlucky professional caught in a bad system. A woman can accept a communications job at a bank and immediately become a referendum on her entire moral character.

Compare that to what actually happens the moment a woman takes a job she is genuinely qualified for. If a former captain of the men's national cricket team had landed this exact title tomorrow, we would already be reading congratulatory posts about a well-earned second career.

Instead, Toma Mirza's entire personal history is being combed for a reason to disqualify her, and the insinuations have gone exactly where they always go for a successful woman: not into her CV, but into her character, and specifically into who she may have slept with to get the job. Nobody asked that question about the bankers who actually lost six lakh crore taka, and nobody ever does when the person under suspicion is a man.

That gap is the actual story here, and it has very little to do with banking. It is what misogyny looks like once you take away the obvious insults: An accountability that bends around men and snaps shut around women. It's a culture that will write off six lakh crore taka in losses as "governance failure" but cannot process a famous woman taking a job without inventing a story about how she must have gotten it.

It's the reflex that treats female celebrity as inherently suspect, decorative, unserious, while treating male credentials as sacred even when the men holding them have just presided over one of the worst banking collapses in South Asia.

Toma Mirza has spent her entire career delivering other people's scripts, well enough to win a National Film Award doing it. She is now being asked to deliver on a different kind of script, and the least we owe her is the same chance we have always extended to men with far worse track records.

If we spent even a fraction of the energy currently aimed at her job title on the officers who signed off on S Alam's loans, we might actually get somewhere.

Faruq Hasan is a development worker and a political analyst.