Jammu, Feb 18 The Crime branch of Jammu and Kashmir Police, on Tuesday, arrested a former bank manager with four other persons in an alleged multi-crore loan scam, officials said.
A crime branch statement said that a case was registered in 2023 on a written complaint from Mohammad Shakeel, the chief manager of the supervision and control division of the Jammu and Kashmir Bank's Jammu zonal office.
"The complainant alleged that Saleem Yousuf Bhatti, a contractual employee of the Integrated Watershed Management Programme, Poonch, and others got the inactive accounts of the watershed committee in the bank's Lassana branch in Surankote activated."
"The accused allegedly got the nomenclature of the accounts changed, issued fake salary certificates and confirmation letters to different non-existing employees, and managed to get personal loans, cash-credit loans, and car loans by posing themselves as government employees," a spokesperson of the Crime Branch said.
"The accused also managed to open fraudulent government accounts at the bank's branch offices at Mendhar and Mendhar Bus Stand."
"They first deposited money through different banks in the accounts of the watershed committee and the fake accounts opened by them issued fake authority letters instructing the branches to disburse and credit the salary in the individual accounts of the accused and thus, managed to fraudulently obtain loans amounting to Rs 5 crore from different branches of the Jammu and Kashmir Bank, causing a huge wrongful loss to the bank."
"Taking its investigation forward, the crime branch arrested five accused, the then manager (scale-II) of the bank's Rajouri branch Jatinder Singh (now demoted) of Jammu, impersonators Mohammad Kabir, Mohammad Zafeer Khan and Zafar Iqbal of Poonch and Mohammad Shakeel of Rajouri," the statement added.
There have been many instances of fraud by some bank officials of different banks operating in Jammu and Kashmir involving crores of rupees.
In most of these cases, professional investigations by the crime branch have arrested the guilty and delivered justice to the victims.
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