A special CBI Court in Mumbai on Tuesday convicted a retired bank manager and nine others in a 2004 home loan fraud case. The court gave prison sentences ranging from one year to five years.
Brothers Kashinath Jadhav and Ganesh Pandurang Jadhav were the main accused in the case. The court sentenced them to five years in jail. Former bank official Metha Sastry was given one year of imprisonment under the Prevention of Corruption Act.
Sastry was a senior manager at the Central Bank of India branch in Prabhadevi, Mumbai. The court said he failed to carry out required checks before and after sanctioning the loans. If these checks had been done, the fraud could have been detected earlier.
Another bank official, Narain Mathur, who was a chief manager, died during the 20-year trial. So, the charges against him were closed.
According to the prosecution, the accused used 17 fake sale agreements to apply for housing loans. They claimed that they were buying flats from Shreeram Sthapatya Construction in Spring Field Apartment in Vasai. However, in reality, no flats were purchased.
The Jadhav brothers also opened fake bank accounts in the name of the construction company at Punjab National Bank.
After the loans were approved by the Central Bank of India, the cheque payments were wrongly deposited into these fake accounts instead of going to the real builder. The money was then quickly withdrawn.
The Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) said that bank officials did not properly verify the loan applicants, the purpose of the loan, or the documents. Loans worth ₹67.70 lakh were given, out of which ₹48.63 lakh remained unpaid.
The owner of the construction company told the court that the signatures on the documents were fake. He also said that the flats had already been sold to real buyers. The court also sentenced the fake buyers involved in the case to one year in jail.
In another update, a CBI Court in Ahmedabad has sentenced four accused persons, including officials of UCO Bank, to five years of rigorous imprisonment (RI) along with fines in two separate bank fraud cases. In the first case, the court convicted Medam Bhagavathi Prasad, who was then serving as Senior Manager and Branch Manager, Bhaskar Rameshchandra Soni, the then Assistant Manager of UCO Bank, and Jayendrasinh Dahyaji Makwana, proprietor of M/s Heaven Five Enterprise, Sabarkantha. All three were sentenced to five years of rigorous imprisonment along with a total fine of Rs. 1.33 crore. Click here to read this full news.
