Tamil Nadu: Couple jailed for spending `40L wrongly credited to their account

TIRUPUR: When a sum of Rs 40 lakh was found mistakenly credited to his bank account way back in 2012, V Gunasekaran, an LIC agent from Tirupur, saw it as a windfall. Without trying to find out how the amount landed in his account, Gunasekaran and his wife Radha went on a spending spree, bought a property and splurged on their daughter's wedding.

Eventually the long arm of the law caught up with them. A trial court here on Monday sentenced the couple to three years imprisonment for spending the cash which got credited to one of their accounts by mistake.

The amount sanctioned under the Member of Parliament Local Area Development Scheme and the MLA Local Area Development Scheme was meant for civil work to be taken up by the Public Works Department. The PWD authorities had mentioned the account number of Gunasekaran instead of that of the PWD executive engineer when they took three demand drafts.

According to the prosecution, Gunasekaran, a resident of Rakkiyapalayam, had a savings account in the Tirupur main branch of Corporation Bank, where the EE too had an account. Though the amount was transferred to Gunasekaran's account, the PWD authorities were not aware of it for eight months. When they realised that the funds had not reached their account, they approached Corporation bank officials who said the money had been credited to the account mentioned in the DD.

When the bank officials checked the account balance of Gunasekaran they found that the entire sum had been withdrawn within days of it being credited, TOI reported.

Senior officials of Corporation bank requested Gunasekaran to re-deposit the money in his account, so that the bank could retrieve it. But he failed to do so. In 2015, the then AGM Narasimha Giri lodged a complaint with Tirupur city's Central Crime Branch (CCB) police against Gunasekaran. CCB registered a case against Gunasekaran and Radha under various Sections, including 403 (dishonest misappropriation of property) and 120 B (criminal conspiracy).