STOP TAXING
CLEAN ENERGY.

ZEPH NEW ENERGY INFRASTRUCTURE

House 86 (5th Floor), Road 17A, Block E, Banani 1213, Dhaka

www.zeph.energy | ob@zeph.energy

Honourable Prime Minister,

We write with respectful congratulations on your election and your assumption of the office of Prime Minister of the People's Republic of Bangladesh. The mandate your government carries is, above all, a mandate for economic repair — and it is in that spirit, as members of the private sector ready to invest, that we place this proposal before you.

We write to set out a single fiscal decision that your government can take by executive and regulatory instrument alone — without new legislation, and without net cost to the Treasury — that would lower the price of every clean-energy good Bangladesh imports, defend the country's foreign-exchange reserves, and give a domestic New Energy industry its first real reason to exist.

That decision is the creation of a New Energy Capital Goods Order: an effective import tariff of zero to minus five percent on a defined basket of New Energy goods — achieved through zero customs duty, zero import VAT, and a small deployment rebate — and funded entirely by a modest levy on the imported fossil fuels that those goods displace.

I. A New Government, and a Decision That Costs the Treasury Nothing

Bangladesh's fiscal position leaves little room for new spending. We are conscious of that, and we have written this proposal so that it requires none. The New Energy Capital Goods Order is designed to be revenue-neutral by construction: the rebate that takes the effective tariff below zero is paid not from the general budget, but from a ring-fenced levy on imported diesel, furnace oil and LNG. The fuels Bangladesh is trying to use less of pay for the transition away from them.

Every instrument this proposal requires already sits within your government's executive and regulatory authority. The National Board of Revenue can amend a customs schedule by Statutory Regulatory Order. SREDA can verify installed capacity. No Parliamentary vote is needed, and no line of the budget is touched. What is required is a decision — and the mandate to take it is precisely what your government holds.

II. Bangladesh Taxes the Cure and Subsidises the Disease

Today, a solar panel, an electric bus, a battery or a waste-to-energy turbine arrives at Chattogram carrying customs duty, import VAT, advance income tax and advance tax. A litre of imported diesel, by contrast, has historically reached the consumer at a price the state held below its true landed cost. Bangladesh, in effect, taxes the technologies that reduce fuel imports and shields the fuel itself. No one designed this; it is an accident of legacy schedules. But its effect is precise — it makes the clean option artificially expensive and the polluting option artificially cheap.

Where concessions for clean-energy goods do exist, they are scattered across individual SROs: time-limited, product-specific and reversible. An investor cannot underwrite a fifteen-year project on a concession that may lapse in twelve months. A single, durable, clearly gazetted Order would replace that uncertainty with a signal an investor can actually bank.

The Honourable Prime Minister needs no reminder that Bangladesh has ranked for over a decade among the countries most exposed to climate risk in the world, and did not create the emissions it is most exposed to. We do not rehearse that case here. We note only its fiscal edge: every cyclone, every metre of saline intrusion, every flooded harvest is a bill the exchequer ultimately absorbs. New Energy is one small, practical part of lowering that bill — and the part the private sector can finance itself, if the price signal allows it.

III. Foreign Exchange: Every Clean-Energy Import Avoids a Fuel Import

Bangladesh imports the overwhelming majority of its liquid fuel, and a rising share of its primary energy as LNG. That import bill runs to several billion US dollars every year and is paid, without exception, in hard currency — the same hard currency the country's foreign-exchange reserves are made of, and that has been under sustained pressure since 2022. Fuel is not only an energy problem for Bangladesh. It is the single largest and most relentless recurring drain on the reserves.

A New Energy good is the opposite. A solar array, an electric bus, a battery, a waste-to-energy plant — each is a one-time hard-currency import that then displaces fuel imports for fifteen to twenty-five years. Read as a foreign-exchange instrument, a panel imported today is a stream of fuel not imported tomorrow. A tariff that makes that substitution cheaper is not an industrial subsidy — it is reserve management. We ask the Honourable Prime Minister and the Ministry of Finance to weigh this proposal first on those terms.

IV. The Instrument We Request: A New Energy Capital Goods Order

We request that the Government of Bangladesh gazette a New Energy Capital Goods Order applying, to a defined basket of HS-coded goods, three elements: zero customs duty; zero import VAT, advance income tax and advance tax; and a five percent deployment rebate paid against capacity verified as installed and commissioned. The first two elements take the effective tariff to zero. The rebate takes it to minus five percent — and, because it pays only on equipment actually deployed, not merely landed, it rewards delivered clean energy rather than speculative import.

The rebate is funded by a ring-fenced levy on imported diesel, furnace oil and LNG, set at a level sufficient to cover it. Because every unit of New Energy deployed reduces the fuel volume on which that levy is collected, the mechanism is self-correcting and revenue-neutral over its life. The proposed basket is set out below; the precise HS lines are a matter for the National Board of Revenue, and we offer our technical support in drawing them.

V. What Other Governments Did — and What Followed

Bangladesh would not be experimenting. Every government that has made clean-energy goods cheaper than their fossil alternative has seen private investment and adoption follow — quickly, and without the state having to build the assets itself. The pattern holds across very different economies:

VI. Six Actions We Request of Your Government

None of the following requires legislation or budget expenditure. Each sits within existing executive and regulatory authority, and all six can be delivered within ninety days of your direction.

VII. What This Unlocks for Bangladesh

• Foreign-exchange defence — every solar array, electric bus and battery deployed under the Order permanently reduces the fuel-import bill, easing the most persistent drain on the reserves.
• Lower energy costs — cheaper imported clean-energy goods mean cheaper power, cheaper transport and less exposure to global fuel-price shocks for households, farms and industry.
• Private investment, not public spending — a durable price signal lets domestic and international investors finance the assets themselves; the state sets the rule, not the budget.
• A reason for industry to begin — duty-free inputs and the optional local-content bonus give assembly and manufacture in Bangladesh a genuine commercial reason to start, without forcing a sector that is not yet ready.
• Cheaper food security — low-carbon and bio-fertilizer at a negative tariff reduces reliance on gas-based urea and the fertilizer subsidy that weighs on the budget every year.
• A credible investment signal — a clearly gazetted, revenue-neutral New Energy Order tells development finance institutions and climate funds that Bangladesh is open, organised and serious.

VIII. Our Pledge to the New Government

• Technical support at no cost — we will help the National Board of Revenue and SREDA draw the HS-code basket and design the verification mechanism, free of charge.
• Immediate deployment — Zeph will commit clean-energy projects under the Order within ninety days of gazette, putting the first verified capacity on the ground.
• Transparent reporting — we will publish the foreign exchange and fuel displaced by every project financed under the Order, so its revenue-neutrality can be audited in public.
• Industry alignment — we will work with importers, manufacturers and operators toward the local-content bonus, building Bangladeshi assembly the way the Order intends: by invitation, not obligation.

Honourable Prime Minister, Bangladesh today pays for energy twice — once at the pump in hard currency, and again in the climate bill the exchequer absorbs downstream. The New Energy Capital Goods Order asks for no new spending. It asks only that the country stop taxing the way out of that position. The mandate to make that decision is yours, and the moment is now.

We remain, Honourable Prime Minister, your most respectfully and loyally,