HYDERABAD: Investigating a financial fraud at the 117-year-old Deccan Club in Secunderabad, city police on Tuesday arrested four persons including the club secretary. Police said that the accused persons have been swindling money to the tune of Rs 1.5 crore for the last three years. They are charged with criminal breach of trust, cheating, falsification of accounts and criminal conspiracy.
A probe was initiated in the month of June 2017 after club president Avinash Gupta lodged a police complaint citing irregularities in the audit report 2016-17. The office bearers initially had found a mismatch of about Rs 30-40 lakh.
DCP(North) B Sumathi on Tuesday said that the club secretary G Ramesh Reddy(63), a civil contractor, colluded with Asim Kumar Maity(32) and Vanga Majulatha(40) who worked as a system administrator and accountant respectively in order to swindle money worth Rs 1.5 crore in the last three years. The role of other employees in the club and the total deceitful amount is yet to be ascertained, she added.
Former treasurer of the club V Nagender Babu(46) was also arrested along with the three others for approving the audit reports for 2014-15 and 2015-16.
Police have recovered Rs 19.69 lakh from Asim Maity's bank account in HDFC's East Marredpally branch and Rs 35.01 lakh from Vanga Manjulatha's bank account in Bank of Baroda's Malkajgiri branch.
According to police, Maity used to take care of all the billing processes and Manjulatha took care of the collection of cash. They were allotted individual user IDs to make entries of all transactions by collecting cash or payment through cards. In several cases, they collected fee towards member subscriptions, sale of liquor and food, banquet hall bookings, lifetime memberships and club's smart card recharge etc through cash.
Police identified four different modus operandi applied by the accused in swindling money. This ranged from showing short deposit in ledger accounts to issue of kachha receipts to club members.
Several documents including a list of transactions, bank statements of the accused, audit reports, the club's bank statement, fraudulent membership transfer documents etc were seized from them.
The Deccan Club today has about 1400 members and records an annual turnover of Rs 4.5 crore. The members pay a monthly subscription of Rs 625 apart from a one-time entry fee of Rs 3 lakh.