According to sources, the CBI has filed an FIR against a suspended execution of the Punjab National Bank (PNB). The employee is alleged of defrauding the state-run lender out of Rs 168.59 crore through 34 fictitious bank guarantees.
According to the CBI FIR, bank employee Priya Ranjan Kumar used a similar method to issue 34 phony bank guarantees. No entries in the PNB’s main banking system Finacle were made. Nearly four years after, the uncle-nephew duo Mehul Choksi and Nirav Modi allegedly used the Lou (letter of undertaking). They used the scam to drain the PNB of approximately Rs 13,000 crore.
“As per the interim investigation report dated November 27, 2022, it emerges that the fraud has been perpetrated by the bank staff in collusion with some unknown persons through illegal and unauthorized usage of the bank’s systems. Further, the aforesaid fake bank guarantee has no record in the Finacle system of the bank,” the FIR alleged.
When Canara Bank’s Kohima branch notified PNB’s Parliament Street office on November 18 to invoke a Rs 5.70 crore bank guarantee allegedly granted by the latter, the new scam was exposed.
According to the CBI, the guarantee was signed by two PNB workers. That included the former branch manager Priya Ranjan Kumar, who is currently on administrative leave. In addition, A Venkatesan resigned from the company when the scam was discovered.
PNB claimed that the greatest scam took place in the year 2018
In the FIR, the agency also included the names of Elangbam Ranananda, MD Enterprises in Andhra Pradesh. Moreover, Heyee Global Enterprises in Noida, Uttar Pradesh.
Kumar is accused of not entering the information about the bank guarantee into the PNB’s Finacle system. But he was instead communicating with Canara Bank via the Structured Financial Messaging System (SFMS).
According to the PNB, the greatest banking scam of 2018 involved companies owned by Choksi and Modi siphoning off Rs 13,000 crore. They used bank-issued Letters of Understanding that were not entered into the core banking system by the bank’s complicit staff to evade detection.
Now, according to the FIR, the bank has discovered 34 such entries in the bank’s SFMS system. The entries were found at Branch Offices Sansad Marg, New Delhi, and Branch Office Arrah Chowk, Arrah (Bihar). These were issued by Kumar using an illegal messaging format MT 799. It was used confirmation of issuance and extending fake bank guarantees through the system.
“There is no record of these 34 entries SFMS messages in the bank’s finance system, and no such bank guarantees were ever issued by the bank in respect of these fraudulent advice/confirmations in invalid format, through MT 799 (Free Format Message) instead of the prescribed MT 760,” the complaint filed by PNB, now part of the FIR, alleged.
The CBI said in a statement, “It was alleged that accused in conspiracy with others through illegal & unauthorized usage of the bank’s system, issued 34 fake bank guarantees, thereby causing loss to PNB for total amount of Rs 168.59 crore (approx).”
