Mumbai, May 2 (IANS): A special court in Mumbai has sentenced to life imprisonment six persons including a banker and slapped a three-year jail term on a lawyer in a 20-year-old fraud involving Rs 2.91 crore in the Bank of India, an official said here on Thursday.
Following a complaint by the bank, the Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) had registered a case in April 2004 on the fraud perpetrated in the BoI's Mandvi Branch.
The case was registered against then BoI Assistant General Manager Bhagwanji D. Joshi, five borrower businessmen -- Manoharlal Ahuja, his son Amit Ahuja, Mahesh Bohra, Sandesh Ramchandra Nage, G. K. Sharma, Shantilal Chauhan -- and lawyer Yunus H. Memon under various sections.
According to the CBI, in 2000, the Ahujas who were partners in Swift Service Linings, Sewri, entered into a criminal conspiracy with some unknown BoI branch officials to defraud the bank by using forged documents.
Accordingly, the company fraudulently got sanctioned credit facilities of Rs 2.50 crore, which were secured by equitable mortgaging of properties worth nearly the same amount at Rs 2.43 crore.
Later, the company defaulted on the repayments and it was declared a non-performing asset (NPA) in early 2004. The documents deposited with the bank turned out to be fake, causing a loss of Rs 2.91 crore to the bank.
After a detailed year-long investigations, the CBI filed a chargesheet in the case in November 2005 and the trial continued before the Special CBI Court in Mumbai during which 37 witnesses were examined.
In what a CBI official termed as an "landmark and extremely rare" verdict, the Special Court has sentenced the Ahuja father-son, Bohra, Nage, Chauhan and BoI former AGM Joshi to life imprisonment, and the lawyer Memon has been sentenced to three years' jail term.
Besides the jail terms, all the accused have also been fined varying amounts -- the Ahujas Rs 50 lakh each, Bohra Rs 300,000, Nage Rs 60,000, Chauhan Rs 50,000, Joshi Rs 100,000 and Memon Rs 3,000.
One of the prime accused Sharma passed away in August 2008 during the pendency of the trial and hence the case against him was dropped, said the CBI.