Page 178 - A Banker Down the Rabbit Hole

to make payment to the seller on submission of non-discrepant
documents specified as per terms of the Letter of credit. The Expatriate
Manager used to invariably run a second check for detecting any
discrepancies in documents. It used to take a lot of time and effort. We
used to delegate some other tasks like scrutinizing and dispatching
outstation cheques and bills under collection arrangement to Junior
Managers to save some time and to meet the deadline of time for
sending them by courier to our correspondent banks by the end of the
day. Of course, we were signing with cursory checking or some other
times without checking as they were working properly and no issues were
found so far in this arrangement.

One fateful day, the Junior Manager of our department had large number
of cheques for collection. She handed over the cheques to the courier
under pressure to meet the deadline of time for the courier to pick up
the consignment. As a result, she did not wait for scrutiny by the
Expatriate Manager. After she had sent the cheques by courier, she
informed, "Sir, please check the register of the consignment. Due to large
number of cheques, I have already sent the cheques through courier. The
photocopies of the cheques are attached." I had never seen such a huge
bunch of cheques in any single day since my joining there. While
scrutinizing the entire lot, I found that most of the cheques were between
USD 100 to USD 1000 while a few of them were between USD 1000 to
USD 5000. One of them was for £ 15000 and surprisingly another single
cheque was for a large amount of USD 350,000 which was very unusual
by any standards for this branch.

Being a bit suspicious on presentment of such a huge bunch of cheques
as well as huge amount involved in some cheques submitted for
collection, I enquired from Ms. Linda, the Junior Manager, about the
credentials of the customer who had deposited the cheques in his
account. She gave me the name of a trading firm dealing in fabrics and
readymade garments operating from one Shopping Plaza called Chun-
King -Mansion mostly frequented by Asians and Africans. Many of the

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