 "Nirav Modi Nirav Modi jewellery showroom, PNB")
India’s Punjab National Bank, the second-biggest state-run lender, stunned the country’s financial sector when it announced this week it had discovered fraudulent transactions worth $1.77 billion at a single branch in Mumbai.
The fraud, by far the biggest ever detected by an Indian bank, comes to light at a time when lenders - especially the state-run banks - are hobbled by $147 billion in soured loans on their books, a problem that has choked new lending and hurt the country’s economic recovery.
Despite tight fiscal conditions, the government recently extended a $14 billion bailout to ailing state banks as part
