A former manager of a nationalized bank in Odisha’s Kendrapara district headquarters town was arrested on Friday on the charge of perpetrating Rs 1.5 crore loan fraud.
The accused Manmohan Mohanty had perpetrated the fraud while officiating as the manager of the Kakat branch of Canara bank in Kendrapara in 2016.
Mohanty, who had sanctioned loans in the name of 14 account holders on the basis of forged documents and cheques, was dismissed from the job in 2018 after the fraud had been detected by an audit squad of the nationalized bank, said the Inspector Kendrapara town police station, Jyotiranjan Samantray.
Police swung into action after a local businessman Satyajit Das lodged a complaint alleging that a sum of Rs 13 lakh was withdrawn from his account. Das, who had earlier applied for a commercial cash credit loan, had handed over the documents and signed blank cheques to the accused Mohanty as prerequisites for the loan sanction. But the loan was not sanctioned. On other hand, the accused withdrew Rs 13 lakh from the loan applicant’s account to his savings account. Adopting a similar plot, he had defrauded 13 other local traders who had applied for a loan and furnished signed blank cheques to the then bank manager Mohanty, the police official said.
After termination from the job in 2018, Mohanty was evading arrest. On a tipoff, we arrested him from the Saheed Nagar police station area in Bhubaneswar. The arrested banker owned luxury apartments in Bhubaneswar and Pipili area. Besides, he had purchased plots in a prime area in Kendrapara town, Inspector Samantray said.
Booked under Indian Penal Code Sections 406 (Punishment for criminal breach of trust) 420 (cheating) 467 (Forgery of valuable security) 468 (Forgery for purpose of cheating) and 477 (A) (Falsification of accounts), the accused banker was later remanded to judicial custody, he concluded.