Kabul: A former cabinet minister has been arrested on corruption charges and a senior adviser to the president, who is also a former central bank chairman, has been questioned amid a growing banking scandal, the attorney general's office said on Tuesday.

Enayat Allah Qasimi, the former minister for aviation and transport, was arrested on two charges of alleged corruption involving up to $9 million, a spokesman for the attorney general's office said on Tuesday.

Noor Allah Delawari, who advises President Hamid Karzai on Afghanistan's banking and private sectors, was also questioned but later released, spokesman Aman Allah Eman told reporters.

There was no immediate response to the charges from Qasimi, or any comment from Delawari.

On Monday, under threat of the loss of support from the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and billions of dollars in aid, the Afghan government agreed to break up the country's biggest lender, Kabulbank, which is mired in a fraud scandal involving hundreds of millions of dollars.

Karzai's government and the IMF have been at loggerheads since September, when the scandal emerged at the politically well-connected Kabulbank that has put at risk at least $579 million through fraud, bad loans and mismanagement.

The central bank had initially resisted the IMF's recommendations that Kabulbank be placed into immediate receivership, arguing that the bank could be rehabilitated and sold later as a going concern.

But on Monday, diplomats in Kabul told Reuters the Afghan government had agreed to put Kabulbank into receivership after a withering assessment by the IMF of its handling of the crisis.

Diplomats also said a special tribunal, set up by Karzai to try cases stemming from last year's troubled parliamentary election, would be used to hear fraud cases stemming from the Kabulbank crisis.

On Tuesday, the New York Times newspaper said a report written this month by the central bank depicted Afghanistan's political elite using Kabulbank as "its private piggy bank".

Among three senior shareholders and former Kabulbank executives under investigation is Mohammad Haseen, the brother of Afghanistan's First Vice-President Mohammad Qasim Fahim.