CBI grills two including CA in Rs 1,000 cr Syndicate Bank case

A Rajasthan-based Chartered Accountant (CA) and a real estate agent were today questioned by the CBI in connection with its probe in Rs 1,000 crore Syndicate Bank fraud case.
While the CA, Bharat Bamb was questioned in the agency headquarters here, Shankar Khandelwal was grilled in its Jaipur office, official sources said here today.
The CBI officials have also recovered Rs 67 lakh cash and three hard discs from one of the employees, identified as Mahendra, of the CA, they said.
Both Bamb and Khandelwal have been detained and questioned, the sources said.
In this scam, four businessmen allegedly managed to open 386 accounts in three branches of Syndicate Bank in Rajasthan in connivance with five of its executives and defrauded it of Rs 1,000 crore using fake cheques, letter of credits and LIC policies.

Satish Kumar Goyal, General Manager (then posted at Jaipur), Sanjeev Kumar, DGM, Regional Office, Deshraj Meena, Chief Manager, MI Road Branch, Adarsh Manchanda, Malviya Nagar, all in Jaipur and Avdhesh Tiwari, AGM, Udaipur have been named in the agency's FIR.

Sources said the accused in alleged connivance with almost all the employees of the bank's three branches--two in Jaipur and one in Udaipur--created a dubious layer of fake transactions involving a shell amount of Rs 18,000 crore. However, the amount of fraud is only Rs 1,000 crore, they said.
The sources said the accused resorted to discounting of fake cheques and bills against fake Letters of Credit and arranged over-draft limit against non-existent LIC policies.

The scam that allegedly ran through 2011-16 continued unabated escaping the audits and throwing to the wind all the formalities of KYC norms as 386 bank accounts of various nature were opened in these three branches of the public sector bank, they said.
The transactions of fake cheques ranged from Rs 40 lakh to Rs five crore with maximum number of cheques in the range of Rs 2.5 crore to four crore, they said.
Explaining the modus operandi, the sources said these people allegedly deposited fake cheques and get a discounted cash on them (For example for the face value of Rs 100 cheque, they got Rs 90 cash immediately).

It is alleged that before the cheque bounced, they used to produce another cheque of higher face value and again get an discounted encashment with a portion of it used to write off against the previous fake cheque. To avoid detection, many of these transactions were nullified from the proceeds of new fraudulent transactions, they said.