Court Appoints 2 Agents To Decode Crb Firm Accounts

The Delhi High Court yesterday appointed two agents to help the official liquidator in the CRB Capital Markets Ltd inquiries with liberty to take in more experts if necessary.

Vacation judge, Justice S N Kapoor, however, warned the Reserve Bank of India (RBI) and the official liquidator that, There shall be no black sheep among them.

Counsel for the RBI, Arun Jaitley, assured the court that the antecedents of all persons selected shall be checked and their names submitted to the court. The agents named in the order are Kailash Narain Mathur, assistant general manager at the central office of the Bank of Baroda (BoB) and B S Ravi Shanker, assistant general manager of RBI.

 

Though the RBI in its application moved in the morning wanted only one agent, the judge insisted on at least four from different fields. He said that there should be one chartered accountant, one company secretary, a lawyer with experience in banking and someone with knowledge of computers.

He also said that the agents should be named in the day itself as the computerised accounts could be tampered with any time. Enormous amounts are involved, he said.

Both the RBI and the liquidator searched the whole day for experts with the qualifications prescribed by the judge. By the evening, they could find only two. Since the panel did not meet all the original requirements, the court in its order allowed the RBI to induct accountants, company secretaries and software experts to assist the two agents. However, none of them shall have any connection with the CRB Caps, the company involved in the Rs 1,200 crore scam.

Earlier, the liquidator alleged that the CRB group companies had erased the accounts fed into the computers and that it would be difficult for him to decode the computerised data without the help of experts. The RBI submitted that more than 75 subsidiaries of the scam-tainted CRB Caps have to be probed, though the court order mentioned only the original 40 companies.