To fund share trading habits, manager siphons Rs 9 crore from co-op bank

“Our investigation which followed the audit findings of the bank, has revealed that the branch manager Amit Deshpande employed multiple methods to siphon large sums of money totalling Rs 9.03 crore from October last year. Deshpande was placed under arrest on Tuesday and a court remanded him to police custody on Wednesday. Our investigation suggests that he has a compulsive habit of share trading and has diverted all the siphoned funds to share trading. Initial findings also suggest that he has incurred very heavy losses on these stock market investments. His questioning and further probe will reveal what has happened to the money that has been siphoned over the year,” said Inspector Vilas Nale, in-charge of the Baramati City police station.

The police investigation revealed that among the various ways Deshpande would siphon funds, one was opening a fake account in the name of a cooperative credit society. Another method was that he allegedly misused another bank employee’s access code to transfer Rs 2.3 crore from a suspense receivable account, which is a temporary holding account that gets receivables which cannot be immediately assigned to a correct customer or account. Deshpande further diverted the funds from this fraudulent account for his use to invest in stocks.

In another method, Deshpande allegedly siphoned over Rs 30 lakh that he was supposed to deposit in a bank account in Bank of Baroda in the name of Pandharpur Urban Cooperative Bank for its operational purposes. Deshpande allegedly went on to open five fraudulent One Time Debt Recast (OTDR) accounts and siphoned over Rs 3.2 crore from the bank over a period of few months.

Pulling yet another scam, Deshpande allegedly swapped the gold pledged by 83 individuals for gold loans with counterfeit jewelry, while using the genuine gold to secure loans from external gold loan entities, thereby raising money for his share trading. Deshpande created 10 fake gold loan accounts in his branch and siphoned funds disbursed as loans to these accounts.

Inspector Nale said, “One of the key focuses of our probe will now be the share trading activity as claimed by him.”