PNB fraud: Internal chief auditor sent to CBI custody till March 14

According to the CBI, Mishra was supposed to verify daily transactions during his tenure and to report irregularities and to verify the same by protecting the interest of banks being an auditor.

The CBI on Friday produced another arrested accused, an internal chief auditor of the Punjab National Bank (PNB), Bishubrata Mishra, before the special CBI court. The court remanded him in CBI custody till March 14. Mishra is the 14th person to be arrested in the case. So far, the CBI has arrested eight officials from PNB and six accused associated with diamantaire Nirav Modi and Mehul Choksi’s companies in the Rs 11,400-crore fraud case.

Mishra worked at the PNB Brady House branch as internal chief auditor from 2011 to 2015. During his tenure, there were more than 100 fraudulent Letter of Undertaking (LoUs) issued by a retired deputy manager of PNB Gokulnath Shetty, one of the main accused in the case.

The LoUs issued were not entered in the Core Banking Solution (CBS) system and without following procedure and without having any sanction limit. Special CBI court judge V V Kathare said that being an internal chief auditor, he had a “responsibility to check the correctness of LoUs and to point out irregularity noticed by him, in which he apparently failed. In circumstances of the case, the custodial interrogation of accused is warranted. Hence the accused is remanded in CBI custody.”

According to the CBI, Mishra was supposed to verify daily transactions during his tenure and to report irregularities and to verify the same by protecting the interest of banks being an auditor. It is alleged that Mishra in conspiracy with co-accused bank officials deliberately failed to point out the fraudulent issuance of LoUs and facilitated Shetty to open LoUs to favour the beneficiaries that his private parties which resulted into losses to PNB to the tune of Rs 6,498 crore.

Special public prosecutor A Limosin informed the court that the custody of Mishra is necessary to unearth the precise role played by the accused and further to trace involvement of other accused in conspiracy to show diversion of funds. Mishra’s lawyer Sonal More informed the court that Mishra had no access to IDs and passwords and he had no role to play. On February 17, the CBI arrested two bank officials, Gokulnath Shetty (61), the deputy manager (retired) of PNB, Manoj Kharat (28), the single window operator of the bank, for their alleged role in issuing eight ‘fraudulent’ LoUs to various companies of the Nirav Modi Group in February 2017.

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