Police focus on Citibank staff

In a startling development in the multi-crore financial scam in Gurgaon, investigators have now trained their guns on more local Citibank executives, and have decided to ask them to appear for questioning.

Investigators said they were examining a complaint filed by Sanjeev Aggarwal, a high net-worth client of Citibank and managing director of Helion Advisors, who had filed a complaint on Tuesday, claiming a loss of Rs 32.43 crore in the financial scam. Aggarwal had named Citibank global CEO Vikram Pandit and Chairman William R Rhodes, among several other senior members of the bank, in his complaint.

“We are concentrating on investigating the case in Gurgaon and will question the people here. We have so far not found anything against top members of the bank, so we are not planning to question Vikram Pandit,” said S S Deswal, the Gurgaon police commissioner.

Deswal also said the police were going through the details provided by Aggarwal, and that any action by the police on his complaint would be taken only after preliminary investigations were completed. Aggarwal has accused the Citibank brass of criminal conspiracy, cheating, breach of trust and fraud in handling his accounts.

When contacted, a Citibank India spokesperson declined to comment on today’s developments. The bank had issued a statement on Aggarwal’s complaint late on Tuesday, saying it had found and reported the matter to regulators and law enforcement agencies and that Aggarwal's claims against senior executives are without basis and the bank wants to contest them vigorously.

So far, investigators have estimated that the financial fraud would be over Rs 300 crore. The case first came to light on December 28 when Binu Soman, an assistant vice-president at Citibank, filed an official complaint with the Gurgaon police accusing relationship manager Shivraj Puri of forging Sebi documents, duping high net-worth clients and illegally transferring money to be invested in the stock market.

Although the police have found that Puri had opened 18 bank accounts in Citibank in the name of his family members, they have maintained that none of Puri’s family members were actually involved in the scam.

Even though Citibank discovered the fraud almost a month before it actually filed a police complaint, the bank decided to carry out internal investigations first.