In a fresh case of a loan scam in Chhatrapati Sambhajinagar, the management of the Ajanta Urban Cooperative Bank, along with its employees who have been with the bank since March 2006, have been charged with cheating, criminal breach of trust, and forgery. The magnitude of the scam amounts to a staggering Rs 97.4 crore, as reported by the city police. The bank’s auditor has already been apprehended.
The FIR was registered late on Wednesday following a complaint from Suresh Kakde, the special auditor of the cooperative societies department, and it has been entrusted to the economic offences wing (EOW). The accused individuals named in the FIR include Subhash Zambad, the incumbent chairman of Ajanta Urban Cooperative Bank and a former Congress MLC, CEO Pradeep Kulkarni, and bank auditor Satish Mohre.
Subhash Zambad has firmly denied all allegations against him and expressed readiness to cooperate with the ongoing investigation. The case has been transferred to the EOW, which promptly arrested Satish Mohre and presented him before a court, resulting in his remand to police custody.
EOW inspector Sambhaji Pawar explained that Satish Mohre was responsible for auditing the bank’s transactions for the financial year 2022-23, yet he failed to raise any red flags regarding 36 suspicious and dubious loan transactions. These transactions were later identified as breaches of existing norms and laws by the special auditor of the department of cooperative societies during their audit of the cooperative bank.
Furthermore, it was discovered that Mohre had submitted forged certificates, along with a fabricated balance sheet, falsely stating that Ajanta Bank had deposits of Rs 32.8 crore in three different banks. The Reserve Bank of India recently imposed restrictions on the bank’s transactions after the alleged dubious transactions came to their attention.