Bangladesh will file a lawsuit in a court in the United States on Wednesday against a Philippine bank over its role in one of the world’s biggest cyber heists, said the governor of Bangladesh’s central bank. In February 2016, unknown perpetrators used fraudulent orders on the SWIFT payments system to steal US$81 million from the Bangladesh central bank account at the Federal Reserve Bank of New York. The money was sent to accounts at the Manila-based Rizal Commercial Banking Corp (RCBC) and then vanished into the casino industry in the Philippines. Fazle Kabir, governor of the Bangladesh Bank, said the lawsuit would be filed in the US District Court for the Southern District of New York. Former Philippines banker jailed over US$81m cyberheist of Bangladesh’s central bank “All necessary processes have been completed and Bangladesh signed an agreement Tuesday night with the New York Fed Bank to assist Bangladesh in handling this case,” Kabir said. RCBC said in a statement on Wednesday it had engaged a top New York law firm to handle its defence. It has previously said the cyber heist was an inside job and the Bangladesh Bank was engaging in a cover-up by maligning it. “We welcome this complaint, as it is an opportunity for RCBC to put on record again that it was a victim of what was started in Bangladesh by still unnamed persons,” the bank said. This month a Philippine court found former RCBC branch manager Maia Deguito guilty on eight counts of money laundering in connection with the heist and sentenced her to a jail term ranging from 32 to 56 years. At least three hacker groups, two from Pakistan and North Korea, were involved in Bangladesh bank heist The Philippine central bank fined RCBC a record one billion pesos (US$20 million) in 2016 for its failure to prevent the movement of the stolen money through the bank. A former treasurer of RCBC and five other workers at the branch where the cash was withdrawn face money laundering charges. Just US$15 million of the stolen money has been recovered from a Manila junket operator, a role that involves marketing casinos to VIPs.