Eow Search On Ex-Employees

The Economic Offenses Wing (EOW) of Mumbai police continued search operations on all six ex-employees of Tata Finance Ltd including former company managing director Dilip S Pendse.

Others in the list are B R Gazdar (executive director and company secretary), AL Shilotri (president and chief executive officer of Niskalp), A G Gaitonde (senior vice-president treasury, Tata Finance), Milind Desai (chief executive officer of Tata Finance Merchant Bankers Ltd) and P B Karyekar (company secretary and chief accountant of Niskalp). The executives are likely to seek anticipatory bail tomorrow.

The search operations, which started on Saturday at the residential premises of some these executives, continued yesterday.

 

The exact details of the findings and the statements made by them are not known. On Friday, the EOW officials started questioning them. None of the executives wanted to comment on the development.

On August 6, Tata Finance had filed a first information report (FIR) with the EOW of Mumbai police against Dilip Pendse and six other executives.

In its complaint, Tata Finance has accused Pendse of criminal breach of trust in diverting large amount of funds from Tata Finance to Niskalp through inter-corporate deposits.

It also said that Pendse had entered into circular transactions from September 1999 to March 2001.

This was intended to mislead the board and the regulators about the exposure of the company to Niskalp, the actual financial position and the company's non-compliance with the Reserve Bank of India (RBI) guidelines.

In the FIR filed, Tata Finance has also accused Pendse of cheating the RBI by filing a false declaration that the company maintained the central bank-stipulated capital adequacy ratio (CAR) -- an offense punishable under Section 415 and 420 of the IPC.

Pendse, after working for 17 years in the Tata group, took over as managing director of Tata Finance on June 1, 1996. He became director of Niskalp on June 19, 1997.