A 35-year-old branch manager of a cooperative bank in Baramati was arrested by the Pune Rural Police on the charge of defrauding the bank of Rs. The investigation has also shown that the accused, who has been embezzling money for more than a year, suffered huge losses in the stock market.
The police under Pune rural area of Baramati Metropolitan Municipality arrested 35-year-old Amit Pradeep Deshpande, manager of Baramati branch of Pandharpur Urban Cooperative Bank Limited on Tuesday. Officials from the audit and vigilance wing of the bank, which has around 30 branches across Maharashtra, approached the Pune rural police earlier this month after an audit of the Baramati branch’s balance sheet revealed several serious anomalies.
“Our investigation following the results of the bank’s audit has revealed that branch manager Amit Deshpande adopted various methods to embezzle a huge amount of Rs 9.03 crore since October last year. Deshpande was taken into custody on Tuesday and was kept in police custody by the court on Wednesday. Our investigation reveals that he has a compulsive habit of share trading and has diverted all the fund funds into share trading. The initial results also showed that he suffered a huge loss in the stock market investment. His interrogation and further investigation will reveal what happened to the looted amount in one year,’ said Vilas Nale, in-charge inspector of Baramati Metropolitan Police Station.
According to the police investigation, one of Deshpande who used to leak money in various ways opened a fake account in the name of cooperative credit society. Another way was that he allegedly misused another bank employee’s access code to transfer Rs 2.3 crore from a suspense receivable account, which is a temporary holding account that receives receivables that cannot be immediately delivered to the right customer or account. Deshpande withdrew funds from this fraudulent account and used them to invest in stocks.
In another way, Deshpande is said to deposit more than Rs 30 lakh for operational purposes in a Bank of Baroda bank account in the name of Pandharpur Urban Cooperative Bank. Deshpande allegedly stole over Rs 3.2 crore from the bank over a period of a few months by opening five fraudulent One Time Debt Recast (OTDR) accounts.
Pulling yet another scam, Deshpande allegedly exchanged the gold pledged for gold loans by 83 people for fake jewellery, while using the real gold to secure loans from external gold lending institutions to raise money for share transactions. Deshpande created 10 fake gold loan accounts in his branch and siphoned off the loan amount in those accounts.
Inspector Nale said, “The main focus of our investigation will now be his alleged share trading activities.”
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