Continuing on its black money trail, the CBI and ED on Sunday conducted searches at 50 locations in connection with alleged illegal remittances of about Rs6,000 crore to Hong Kong through the Bank of Baroda (BoB) and started questioning some prime suspects in the case. The two agencies had on Saturday raided BoB’s Ashok Vihar branch here where the transactions took place.
Most of the 59 account holder companies have given wrong addresses and sent these remittances in the garb of payments for suspected non-existent imports.
Some people connected with these payments were summoned to the CBI headquarters for questioning. “The CBI has registered a case under Section 120-B (criminal conspiracy) read with 420 (cheating) of IPC and Section 13(2) read with 13(1)(d) of Prevention of Corruption Act, 1988 against 59 current account holders and unknown bank officials and private persons on a complaint from Bank of Baroda,” said a CBI spokesperson.
The FIR stated the “59 current account holders and unknown bank officials conspired to send overseas remittances, mostly to Hong Kong, of foreign exchange worth approximately Rs 6,000 crore in illegal and irregular manner in violation of established banking norms under the garb of payments towards suspected non-existent imports”. The ED has also registered a case in this connection.
The bank had carried out an internal probe after an audit red flagged nearly 8,000 transactions done from its Ashok Vihar branch here.
They said the account holders who were allegedly sending these payments to Hong Kong had claimed that these were advances for imports of cashew, rice, etc whereas no such imports ever took place.
Sources said these remittances were sent by splitting them into amounts below one lakh USD to avoid automatic detection by software used by banks to alert them about such transactions.
They said in taxation language the method is known as smurfing and holders were able to skip the scrutiny of such transactions. These 59 current accounts were opened in the name of companies, giving wrong addresses, then cash worth crores was deposited over a period, the sources said.
later, the bank was asked to make the payments as advances for the purported imports, they added.