The Madras High Court has discharged a former State Bank of India (SBI) clerk from two cases booked against him on charges of manipulating bank records besides fabricating telex messages purportedly issued by its New York branch and getting hundreds of dollars transferred to the bank accounts of his wife and another individual.
Justice G. Jayachandran discharged M. Murugappan from the two cases on the ground that he had already been convicted by a trial court in a related case, an appeal against which was pending in the High Court, and therefore prosecuting him with respect to two other transactions related to the first case would amount to double jeopardy.
According to the prosecution, the petitioner was serving as a clerk in the Ambattur Industrial Estate branch of SBI in 1996-97 when the alleged crime took place. As per a complaint lodged by the then assistant general manager of the bank, the petitioner duped some of the customers of the bank and carried out the illegal transactions. He submitted fake telex messages reportedly issued by SBI’s New York branch and got nearly $14,000 transferred to his wife’s savings bank account. Similarly, he created fabricated telex messages and got $8,145 transferred to the Non Resident External (NRE) account of a person named Kannappan.
Though the cause of action in all three transactions were the same and the witnesses were also the same, the CBI had filed a final report in 2001 in one of the three cases. The chargesheets in the other two cases were filed a couple of years later.
During the trial proceedings in the first case, the petitioner moved an application before the special court for CBI cases with a plea to try the other two cases also along with the first one. However, the special court refused to accept the plea since as many as 20 witnesses had already been examined in the first case.
Since clubbing the other cases with the first one would require recalling all those witnesses and re-examining them, the trial court declined the request for a joint trial. It also dismissed the petitions filed by the accused to discharge him from the other two cases, and hence the present revision petition.
