The Economic Offences Wing (EOW) of Mumbai Police arrested three persons including a former director of the Punjab & Maharashtra Cooperative Bank (PMC) and its valuers, in connection with the probe into the Rs.4355-crore scam, an official said here on Thursday.
The arrested-accused are Jasvinder S. Banvait, a former director of the PMC Bank, and Vishwanatha S. Prabhu and Shripad G. Jere, both from a valuers firm Yardi Prabhu Consultants & Valuers Pvt. Ltd.
Banvait was a director when and member of the Loan, Investment and Executive Committee of PMC Bank for many years. It was against this background that he was interrogated on the loans extended to HDIL Group, their long-pending dues, and remedial measures initiated to recover or regularize the same.
Prabhu and Jere are charged with complying with the desires of the former PMC Bank chairman Joy Thomas and inflated the valuation of the PMC-owned assets in 2012-2015 to enable maintain the Bank Capital Adequacy ratio as mandated by the Reserve Bank of India.
The trio was thoroughly interrogated by the EOW sleuths, but failed to provide satisfactory or convincing replies, confirming their involvement in the frauds.
They were placed under arrest and have been remanded to police custody till March 16, said the official.
Earlier, nearly 12 other accused, including top officials of the bank, promoters of HDIL Rakesh Wadhawan and Sarang Wadhawan and others, have been arrested in the PMC Bank scam which erupted late September 2019 and resulted in the deaths of around 10 persons, including depositors.
The bank’s aggrieved depositors have been agitating since the past six months to get their money stuck in the scam-hit bank after the RBI imposed a moratorium on it last September following serious irregularities which tumbled out.-IANS News
