Congress and BJP spar over bank fraud
The Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) on Friday alleged the Punjab National Bank (PNB) bank fraud, involving jewellers Nirav Modi and Mehul Choksi, had its origins in 2013, during the Congress-led United Progressive Alliance (UPA) regime.
The Congress released documents accusing the Prime Minister’s Office (PMO), and Union ministries and central probe agencies, of inaction, when the fraud had been brought to their notice by whistle-blowers in 2015. It said Bengaluru resident Hari Prasad SV, who had written to the PMO in July 2016 about the fraud, was not the first whistle-blower in the case.
Union Minister for Human Resource Development Prakash Javadekar, released a letter written by Dinesh Dubey in November 2013, a government nominee on the Allahabad Bank board, to the then finance secretary, where Dubey had pointed to his dissent at Choksi and Modi being given loans having been overruled. Javadekar said Dubey was later forced to quit.
“It is shocking how a whistle-blower was forced to resign. Who forced him?” Javadekar asked. The minister said the examples of scams were those that took place during the UPA years — 2G spectrum allocation, coal block allocation, Commonwealth Games scam, alleged land deals of Robert Vadra. He alleged that days after Dubey’s letter, Congress president Rahul Gandhi had attended an exhibition hosted by Nirav Modi in New Delhi’s Imperial Hotel. He said the bank fraud cannot be equated with UPA era scams. “These cannot be equated with a banking-level fraud taking place in connivance with unscrupulous professionals,” Javadekar said. The difference between UPA era scams and this one was that earlier ones happened under signed documents by the then prime minister Manmohan Singh, he said. “This is a fraud at the bank’s level. The government has acted swiftly by suspending Nirav Modi’s passport, and seizing properties worth more than ~51 billion as soon as the matter came to its notice,” he added.
Congress spokesperson Randeep Singh Surjewala said two other individuals had alerted the PMO, Enforcement Directorate, Ministry of Corporation Affairs, Mumbai Police, Securities and Exchange Board of India (Sebi) and Ahmedabad police’s Economic Offences Wing (EOW) of the fraud and the possibility of Choksi leaving the country.
The Congress released documents that show Vaibhav Khuraniya, who claimed to have been defrauded, had written to the PMO, other ministries, and probe agencies in May 2015. Digvijaysinh Jadeja, who had also alleged being defrauded by Choksi, filed an affidavit in the Gujarat High Court in 2016. In May 2017, Khuraniya had complained to Sebi.
Surjewala said not just the PNB, the fraud also covered 16 other banks. According to a document released by the Congress, 17 banks loaned ~25.54 billion. A Gujarat-based Congress leader alleged the fraud was kept under wraps in view of the Assembly polls. The Congress also disputed Law Minister Ravi Shankar Prasad’s claim that Prime Minister Narendra Modi does not know Choksi. The party released a video of the PM’s speech at the launch of the gold monetisation scheme in November 2015, which Choksi had not only attended, but whose presence the PM had also acknowledged in his speech.
Surjewala demanded the PM to break his “vow of silence” on the issue. “How is it possible that the four-stage audit of the banking system failed to detect the fraud, especially when a rating agency had flagged its concerns about one of Choksi’s companies?” Surjewala asked.