PNB Scam: Three officials of PNB’s forex department arrested

Mumbai: Three officials of the Punjab National Bank’s Brady House branch were arrested on Monday evening. They are Chief Manager Bechhu Tiwari, Manager Yashwant Joshi and Officer Praful Sawant. Tiwari was in charge of the Forex Department and responsible for supervising Gokulnath Shetty’s work. Shetty, it will be recalled, had connived with the Modi group to float fake LoUs.

Joshi is a Scale II manager in the Forex Department and responsible for filing daily reports on the ‘SWIFT’ Interbank messaging system and the CBS entries. He, too, had full knowledge of the activities of Shetty but took no action to prevent the scam. Sawant is a Scale I Officer (Export) who was responsible for checking SWIFT messages.

Shetty and another officer Manoj Hanumant Kharat — with the help of Tiwari, Joshi and Sawant — fraudulently issued eight Letters of Understanding amounting to Rs 280.70 crores on February 9, February 10 and February 14 in favour of Allahabad Bank and Axis bank based in Hong Kong. They did so without following the prescribed procedure; they also did not make entries in the bank system to avoid detection of the transactions, so made. The amount involved in the fraudulent LOUs is around Rs 6000 crores.