How a media mogul bankrolled covert pro-Hasina campaign

Kazi Anis Ahmed isn’t your run-of-the-mill Bangladeshi elite. Born into a military family that now commands a sprawling business empire, Ahmed boasts an Ivy League education and a PhD in comparative literature from New York University. When he’s not rubbing shoulders with Tilda Swinton or hosting literary soirées, he can be found offering sharp takes on Bangladesh in the pages of The New York Times or The Guardian, embedding himself among the crème de la crème of the global elite. He also leads the Bangladesh chapter of PEN International, a position that affords him the gravitas of a staunch advocate for free speech.

Under his stewardship, the Kazi family’s once-formidable media holdings have been revived with a fresh arsenal: a print newspaper, a digital Bengali news platform, a literary magazine, and two book publishing houses. But profitability is another story. The Dhaka Tribune, the crown jewel of the editorial empire, has long struggled with financial instability, with its reporters often left awaiting delayed salaries more anxiously than their next scoop. Meanwhile, one of the family’s publishing ventures has garnered a reputation for missing royalty payments, according to half a dozen authors.

And yet, Kazi Anis Ahmed, 54, somehow managed to divert thousands of dollars — channelled through a Dubai-based firm, no less — into a years-long covert lobbying effort in Washington DC. This clandestine political operation on foreign soil risked violating US and Bangladeshi laws and was aimed at shoring up the image of Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina, eventually toppled by a mass uprising on August 5th, and discrediting her adversaries, according to documents and records obtained by Netra News.

While the Kazi family’s ties to the now-deposed autocrat are no secret, these revelations cast a sharp spotlight on the extraordinary lengths to which Ahmed went to help maintain Hasina’s iron grip on power. It also exemplifies how Bangladesh’s debonair urban elite played a crucial role in sustaining her rule — despite her dwindling public legitimacy — even if doing so contrasted with many of their professed secular and liberal values.

A liberal patron for far-right lobbying

On May 10th 2015, Seth Oldmixon, then a Washington-based lobbyist with ties to far-right circles, filed paperwork with US authorities to represent Liberty South Asia, an entity that was founded by Oldmixon himself. It wasn’t until over a year later that he quietly amended his registration, adding Green Perspective FZE—a Dubai-based firm with vague “interests in South Asia”—as a foreign contributor to the lobbying effort. Netra News would later uncover that Green Perspective was directly controlled by Kazi Anis Ahmed. The influence operation, in the years to come, would report spending over $430,000 on lobbying.

Oldmixon’s outreach, meanwhile, extended into the upper echelons of the US government, targeting key agencies like the State Department, the Defense Department, and even the U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom. His campaign also focused heavily on the U.S. Congress, with a particular emphasis on advancing four resolutions—three of which were backed by two of the most divisive figures in Congressional politics: Tulsi Gabbard and Jim Banks.

Their resolutions carried a similar, disturbing undercurrent. While presented as benign, they sought to rewrite the history of the 1971 Bangladeshi War of Independence, framing the anti-Bengali genocide primarily as an anti-Hindu pogrom—a line often pushed by Hindu nationalist groups with influence in Western capitals. At the same time, they labelled Jamaat-e-Islami, long an enemy of Sheikh Hasina’s government, as effectively a terrorist organisation, and cast aspersions on the Bangladesh Nationalist Party, the country’s main opposition at the time. Another resolution lavished praise on Hasina’s handling of the Rohingya crisis—an episode her government frequently exploited as a rare bright spot amid a tenure otherwise mired in human rights violations.

Liberty South Asia publicised the portions of these resolutions that vilified Hasina’s opponents. On their surface, the resolutions may not have seemed like a radical worldview. After all, Jamaat-e-Islami’s dark history—its complicity in the Pakistani army’s war crimes in 1971 and its Islamist political agenda—has made it a polarising force in Bangladesh for decades. But Oldmixon’s involvement casts the affair in a far more sinister light.

Oldmixon’s affiliations with Islamophobic organisations like the Middle East Forum—an outfit labelled “anti-Muslim” by the Southern Poverty Law Center—were well documented. In a 2019 email obtained by Netra News, Clifford Smith, a Middle East Forum staffer, lauded H.Res.160, one of the resolutions sponsored by Jim Banks. The email, sent to a Bangladeshi journalist, not only highlighted the Forum’s support for the resolution but referred to Oldmixon’s Liberty South Asia as a “partner-org.” 

The connections didn’t stop there. Oldmixon and Sam Westrop, another figure from the Middle East Forum, joined Congressman Jim Banks at the Hudson Institute — a conservative think tank — alongside Abha Shankar, a pro-Hindutva analyst for the Investigative Project on Terrorism. The IPT, according to the Center for American Progress, forms part of “the Islamophobia network in America.” New York’s Attorney General had even called for the group to cease its “espionage” operations targeting American Muslims.

Between 2017 and 2023, Oldmixon also penned several opinion pieces on Bangladesh, carefully aligning his commentary with the objectives of his lobbying efforts. He did not respond to a detailed set of questions sent by Netra News.

A legal and ethical quagmire

The covert influence campaign financed by Kazi Anis Ahmed and led by Seth Oldmixon is riddled with legal and ethical landmines, according to a Netra News analysis of the lobbying activities.

From the outset, Kazi Anis Ahmed sought to obscure his involvement in the secretive lobbying effort — which spanned two phases from 2015 to 2019. Officially, Liberty South Asia, a likely unincorporated pressure group, was listed as the patron of the campaign, but the entity was represented by the lobbyist himself, Seth Oldmixon. SPR Consulting, another organisation with a New York address, was cited as an “affiliated organization,” yet no record of such a non-profit or private entity exists in New York.

The bulk of the funds, if not all, originated from a company in the United Arab Emirates with a charmingly innocuous name: Green Perspective [FZCO], a UAE-registered firm owned by Ahmed, according to a Dubai government database and official registration documents obtained by Netra News.

Records also confirm that Ahmed’s Dubai-based company shares the same address as the entity listed by Oldmixon as his foreign sponsor. Its official business activities, as per registration documents in Dubai, are related to trading soft commodities like tea, coffee, and snack foods.

The use of this UAE intermediary to finance lobbying efforts in the US raises questions about, if not the source of the funds themselves, how Ahmed managed to move such funds out of Bangladesh, given the country’s stringent regulations on foreign currency transfers. However, Ahmed’s challenges are not limited to Bangladeshi financial regulations. 

Under US law, lobbyists representing foreign political interests are required to register under the Foreign Agents Registration Act (FARA) and publicly disclose the details of their lobbying activities. Yet, Oldmixon, the lobbyist on Ahmed’s payroll, chose instead to file under the more lenient Lobbying Disclosure Act (LDA), typically reserved for commercial rather than political lobbying. This setup, using Green Perspective FZCO—a company that otherwise deals in trade—seems crafted to meet the LDA’s commercial criteria while discreetly concealing the political nature of the lobbying.

The Awami League’s history of using intermediaries for foreign influence operations provides context. In 2021, for example, the Bangladesh Enterprise Institute, a Dhaka-based think-tank, facilitated the hiring of an American lobbyist who later disclosed their work through FARA, though the government was not the official client. Similarly, Tehzeeb Alam Siddique, a Cornell-educated former MP from the Awami League, “personally” recruited a US firm for political lobbying, which correctly identified itself as an agent of the Bangladesh government.

However, Ahmed’s lobbying efforts did not follow this protocol, despite their heavily partisan nature and his tight links to the Awami League. His father, Kazi Shahid Ahmed, was a prominent elder within the party circles, founding the Ajker Kagoj newspaper in the 1990s with the principal aim of promoting Sheikh Mujibur Rahman, the father of Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina, according to an excerpt of his autobiography. Ahmed’s elder brother, Kazi Nabil Ahmed, served as an Awami League MP and a member of the parliamentary committee on foreign affairs until the unglamorous end of the government. Even Ahmed himself has been involved with the party, advising Whiteboard Magazine, a slick publication run by the Awami League-affiliated Centre for Research and Information, and edited by Sheikh Hasina’s nephew, Radwan Mujib Siddiq Bobby.

Any lobbying benefiting a foreign political party should be registered under FARA, even if the sponsor — in this instance, Ahmed — is not directly affiliated with the party, said Nick Cleveland-Stout, from the Democratizing Foreign Policy programme at the Quincy Institute in Washington, DC.

“These lobbying activities seem to have explicitly targeted political opponents of the Awami League government,” he added. “At a bare minimum, the Awami League government in power at the time certainly seems to have been a principal beneficiary of these lobbying efforts.”

US prosecutors went after Donald Trump’s former National Security Advisor, Michael Flynn, for a remarkably similar scheme. As a lobbyist, Flynn accepted money from a Turkish businessman via a Dutch company to advance Turkish interests, a campaign that prosecutors argued was directed by the Turkish government. As such, Flynn should have registered as a foreign agent, but instead, he — like Oldmixon — opted for the less stringent Lobbying Disclosure Act. Doing so allows a lobbyist and their clients to avoid the transparency required for such activities.

“It’s in the public interest of both Americans and Bangladeshis to know what a firm funded by someone with ties to the Bangladeshi government was lobbying for, who they were contacting, and what kind of materials they were distributing to US government officials,” Cleveland-Stout said in an email. “Since they registered under the LDA instead of FARA, it’s much more difficult to piece together that information.”

And beyond legal considerations, Ahmed’s actions also plunge into a murky ethical swamp.

Did he disclose to The Wall Street Journal or The New York Times that he had a personal stake in maligning the Awami League’s opponents when he pitched his opinion pieces that — like his opaque campaigns — portrayed them as extremists or dangerous Islamists? It seems unlikely. Had these publications been aware of his political entanglements, those op-eds would likely have been rejected outright or accompanied by a necessary disclosure that would have made them far less potent.

The whole episode, if nothing else, paints a damning portrait of Kazi Anis Ahmed, a man who, at least publicly, projects himself as a liberal intellectual and champion of free expression. But behind the scenes, he was leveraging his wealth to fuel a far-right campaign to burnish the image of a dictator on the international stage. He has not responded to multiple requests for comments from Netra News.

During the height of the recent student protests that eventually toppled the Hasina regime, Kazi Anis Ahmed was vocal in his condemnation. He took to Facebook to denounce the demonstrators, even as hundreds had already been killed by Hasina’s security forces — including police, paramilitary units, and political militias. Under his leadership, PEN Bangladesh remained conspicuously silent about the brutal crackdown, despite PEN International issuing a strong rebuke of the government’s ferocious response.

“Sheikh Hasina is still better than the alternatives,” he insisted to The Wall Street Journal just five days before Hasina fled the country, leaving behind a death toll of more than seven hundred in the bloodiest unrest in Bangladesh’s history. Leaked audio recordings last week revealed that Zulfiqer Russell, the editor of Bangla Tribune, Ahmed’s online vernacular outlet, met with Hasina days before her ouster, offering his unwavering support and urging for even more hardening tactics against protesters.

These days, though, Ahmed’s media outlets are singing a different tune — loudly.

Dhaka Tribune, whose coverage too often coincided with pro-Hasina talking points, is now pumping out frequent love letters to the movement that uprooted her. Hasina had turned Bangladesh “into a kakistocracy – the rule of the worst,” declares Zafar Sobhan, the editor of the paper, in a recent blistering article.●