Crb Caps President, 4 Directors Arrested

Six persons have been arrested by the Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) in connection with the Rs 1200 crore scam that has rocked the CRB group of companies with the investigating agency seizing investment documents worth crores of rupees and other papers which could throw light on the extent of the financial irregularities.

Those arrested included the president of CRB Capital Markets M L Khetan, four directors of CRB Caps Sushil Golcha and Gautam Chopra (both directors in CRBs Bikaner office), and Sanjay Jalan and Bajranglal Baid (directors in the Mumbai office) and a relative and close associate of CRB group chairman Chain Roop Bhansali, sources said.

 

Bhansalis relative, Pokhraj Jain, who was arrested in Delhi, was produced in the court of additional chief metropolitan magistrate S K Kaushik. The court granted transit remand to CBI for producing him before a Bombay court on June 8. In Mumbai, Khetan and the two directors Jalan and Baid were remanded to police custody till June 19 by the additional chief metropolitan magistrate S D Madake.

The seizures included the companys shares worth Rs 130 crore (recovered from the residence of a typist of the company in Mumbai), three cheques valued at Rs 7 crore from Bhansalis Mumbai residence and shares of other companies worth another Rs 7 crore from the Delhi residence of one Bimal Bhansali, the sources said.

120 officer-posts sanctioned for DoS

Joyeeta Dasgupta CALCUTTA

In a crisis-management measure, the Reserve Bank of India has decided to recruit 120 more officers for its department of supervision (DOS) to ensure that it is able to effectively supervise non-banking financial companies.

The officer strength in the DOS is just 123 at present, with a responsibility to monitor 12,000 NBFCs which means each officer has to supervise 100 NBFCs on an average. Sources said that in the wake of the CRB fiasco, all DOS heads were instructed at a meeting on May 17 in Mumbai, to stop all other work and deploy all available staff to complete NBFC registrations by July.

The new RBI amendment requires registration of all NBFCs with RBI which have net owned funds of Rs 2.5 lakh and above. However, the registration process has been extremely slow and a dismal percentage of NBFCs which have greater than Rs 2.5 lakh net owned funds are registered with the apex bank. According to an RBI directive, the registration of all NBFCs have to be now completed by July 8.