The Reserve Bank of India (RBI) has filed a criminal case in Lucknow’s chief judicial magistrate’s court against directors and the CEO of a cooperative bank —Indian Mercantile Cooperative Bank Ltd — for allegedmoney laundering worth hundreds of crores involving fictitious entities.
The bank is linked to BSP Rajya Sabha MP Akhilesh Das Gupta. His wife, Alka, a former head of the bank who is still on its board, has been made a respondent by the RBI. Some of the suspicious transactions involve BSP leaders. The BSP leaders have strongly disputed the contents of the report.
The case was taken up by other investigating agencies after Intelligence Bureau, which ran its own checks, alerted the finance ministry to a suspected money laundering racket running into thousands of crores.
In any case, RBI’s findings were alarming enough, with the central bank reporting a series of transactions where crores were deposited and withdrawn, with the bank allegedly failing to meet the requirement of checking the antecedents of the account holders.
The RBI report suspects that fictitious entities were engaged in transactions which in many cases involved more than Rs 10 crore. Subsequent efforts to trace the account holders failed.
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