NEW DELHI: The Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) has arrested two senior executives M/s Reliance Communications controlled by industrialist Anil D Ambani in a Rs 2929 crore bank fraud case, the agency said on Monday.
The arrested accused have been identified as D Vishwanath and Anil Kalya.
The federal probing agency had registered a case against Reliance Communications Limited, Anil D Ambani and unknown others on the complaint of the State Bank of India (SBI), on the allegations that the bank had sanctioned credit facilities to the accused company but due to the fraudulent activities of the accused borrowers, Bank had to suffer wrongful loss of around Rs. 2929.05 crores.
“As per the complaint filed by SBI, a wrongful loss of Rs 19,694.33 crores has been caused to 17 public sector banks / FIs.Investigation thus far has revealed that R. Com Ltd entered into circuitous transactions through shell entities controlled by the company’s officials and also got discounted LCs opened for bogus service-related transactions with its group entities, which got devolved, causing huge loss to the banks,” CBI said.
D Vishwanath, joint president of R. Com, was overall in charge of banking operations of the group and on his directions, the mis-utilisation of funds was carried out.
He was in coordination with banks for the sanction and disbursal of the facilities to the accused company. Anil Kalya, vice president, had actively supported D Vishwanth, and these two were important functionaries of the R. Com Group managing corporate finance, banking operations, payments and utilisation of funds.
The probing agency in the last few months has registered seven cases against the Anil Ambani-led Reliance Group on the complaints lodged by various Public Sector Banks and LIC for fraud running into thousands of crores of Rupees.
In the meantime, a week earlier, the Enforcement Directorate (ED) had also arrested Anil Ambani's two top aides, Amitabh Jhunjhunwala, former vice-chairman of Reliance Capital Ltd, and Amit Bapna, the company's former chief financial officer (CFO) and chief operating officer (COO), in connection with money laundering investigations.