The Bhagalpur police’s Special Investigation Team that is probing the role of six officials and employees of the Bhagalpur Central Cooperative Bank has found evidence of how the cooperative bank had helped Srijan Mahila Vikas Sahyog Samiti grow as a parallel bank illegally and at the cost of its own growth. According to a rough assessment made from bank statement details of the last 10 years, about Rs 160 crore has been illegally transferred to Srijan’s accounts.
The Bhagalpur Central Cooperative Bank suffered on two counts — first, by the illegal transfer of its own funds to Srijan’s accounts and also by most self-help groups of Sabour and adjoining blocks which would have otherwise opened their account in the cooperative bank. Srijan, a registered cooperative society, was not allowed to make transactions more than Rs 50,000.
Srijan, however, was running a bank illegally through the cooperative society. It was on then Bhagalpur district magistrate K P Ramaiah’s order in 2003 that Srijan was allowed to do banking. “The kingpin behind swindling of the cooperative bank’s funds was Pankaj Kumar Jha, the district cooperative officer and managing director of the bank between 2007 and 2014,” said an investigator.
Jha, arrested last week from Supaul, allegedly had opened the cooperative bank’s account with Indian Bank, Bhagalpur, employees of which connived with Jha and Srijan to carry out the siphoning,” the investigator added. Jha did face a departmental inquiry but the cooperative department in Patna did not take any action against him.
Besides Jha, the other arrested cooperative bank employees are former accounts manager Harishanker Upadhyay, then in-charge manager Sudhanshu Kumar Das and assistants Ashok Kumar Ashok, Vijay Kumar Gupta and Sunita Choudhary.
