There is more trouble at the door of insolvency hit Educomp Solutions Ltd (ESL). According to officials in the know, the Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) has registered a bank fraud case against Educomp Solutions Ltd (the borrower company), Shantanu Prakash (Managing Director and Guarantor), and Jagdish Prakash (a Guarantor).

Edu Smart Services Private Ltd (a corporate guarantor), Vijay Kumar Choudhary (a Director) and Vinod Kumar Dandona (a Director) have also been named in the FIR filed by the CBI.

“The borrowing company and its directors, guarantors and unknown others conspired and committed the acts of forgery, including valuable securities, used forged documents as genuine, diverted and siphoned off the banks’ funds and cheated the lending banks to the tune of ₹1955.36 crore,” the CBI said.

CBI officials said that a complaint has been lodged by State Bank of India on behalf of itself and IDBI Bank, Union Bank of India, Central Bank of India, Syndicate Bank, YES Bank and ICICI Bank. These banks have declared this account as fraud and reported to the RBI.

The CBI said that ESL is accused of cheating and defrauding SBI and 12 other banks in a consortium. The other banks in the consortium are Axis Bank, J&K Bank, StanChart Bank, Canara Bank, ACRE, and IndusInd Bank. These banks are also in process to examine fraud angle in this account.

CBI officials said that searches were conducted at eight places, including office premises of ESL and Edu Smart Services Private Limited, also at residential premises of directors and guarantors. These searches were conducted in Delhi, Gurugram and Dehradun. The ESL loan accounts became non-performing assets in 2016.

It has also been alleged that ESL and Edu Smart Services Private Ltd through its Directors had forged the tri-partite contracts with the schools and induced banks for getting disbursement of term loans by including either non-implemented, cancelled, closed or pre-closed contracts in the list of executed contracts.

Related Topics
comment COMMENT NOW