Delhi court raps ED while discharging relationship manager of Bank of Singapore in Rs 354-crore bank fraud case
A Delhi court pulls up ED for relying on the statements of co-accused Rajiv Saxena, who had turned approver in the AgustaWestland scam case, stating that ‘singing songs of praise’ for him was ‘surprising and deplorable’.
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Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) has accused Ratul Puri in a Rs 354-crore bank fraud case as allegedly caught siphoning off money by misusing loans granted to them. (File Photo)While pulling up the Enforcement Directorate, a Delhi court has discharged Nitin Bhatnagar, relationship manager of the Bank of Singapore, in a money-laundering case where Central Bank of India was allegedly cheated out of Rs 354 crore.
The ED alleges that Moser Baer, the company which is the main accused in the case, had defrauded Central Bank of India and other banks and that the total proceeds of crime are worth Rs 7,980 crore. Ratul Puri was the executive director of Moser Baer.
“How could the accused who was only working as a relationship manager in Bank of Singapore have worked out that such funds were part of the dirty money,” Special Judge Sanjeev Aggarwal of the Rouse Avenue Court said in an order on August 17.
As per the ED, the role of Bhatnagar in the offence was that he introduced a real estate company called IPF Real Estate Brokers LLC to help John Docherty and Ratul Puri receive funds worth $20 million from Rajiv Saxena, an accused in the case.
Docherty, a close associate of Puri, had allegedly asked Bhatnagar to arrange a real estate company to facilitate a “fictitious transaction that would appear as a legitimate real estate deal” to help in the transfer of $20 million and to project these funds as untainted.
“There was no device available with the accused from which he would have calibrated that it was the same money he was dealing with as a relationship manager, which has been siphoned off from Moser Baer by defrauding the Canara Bank and others banking entities,” said the court, adding that while the transactions took place in 2012-13, an FIR was registered in 2019.
The court also pulled up banks, whose job it said was to report such suspicious transactions to the authorities. “They (banking companies) failed to follow the due diligence procedures in sniffing out the crime money,” said Judge Aggarwal.
Pulling up the ED, the court said that while stating that the money had gone through a hawala channel, the agency had failed to record statements of any hawala dealer. The prosecution is “itself not sure about the true nature of the transactions in question”, it added.
The ED was also admonished for relying on the statements of Rajiv Saxena, who had turned approver in the AgustaWestland scam case. The court said that “singing songs of praise” for Saxena was “surprising and deplorable”.
Stating that the ED has disowned Saxena as the approver in the AgustaWestland case, the court said that his statements must be viewed with suspicion and taken with a pinch of salt.
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