Page 233 - A Banker Down the Rabbit Hole

till the clarifications asked by our stock auditor are received by us. They
did not press for it any further. Immediately after this, they came up with
a request to transfer the leadership of consortium to Bank 'B' having their
Head office locally for faster decisions on their issues as our corporate
office at a distant place had been taking long time to take decisions. We
were glad to accept this proposal and asked the Bank B to remit the
amount for our 10% share to reduce our outstanding to make their share
as 40%, which the bank 'B' promptly did. We could recover about Rs 10
crore very fast this way.

A fraudulent act
We just enquired from the bank 'B' whether they would approve the
setting up of their foreign subsidiary given the current conduct of the
account of OFC Private Ltd. They informed that the Company had already
done that a few months before after approval of our bank while we were
the leader of the consortium.

We were surprised as we had not approved the remittance. Our Head of
Foreign Exchange Department went to the concerned department of RBI
to check who had signed and endorsed the Foreign Exchange Remittance
application with RBI. He was shocked to see his forged signature with a
rubber stamp of the bank on the application form submitted to RBI by
the company.

Surprisingly, the other two banks were least bothered about the
happenings and never suggested anything other than what we were
doing. We called the Chairman of the company to meet our new Chief
of the branch to discuss about conduct of their accounts. The GM
(Finance) of the company conveyed to us that as per their protocol, the
Chairman of the company would only meet the Chairman of the Bank.
This was height of arrogance and clear signal of serious problems in the
account after we had got many other signals already. We decided to take
immediate next steps for recovery of our dues.

Meanwhile, the Head of Foreign Exchange Department had procured a
photocopy of the forged application. The Chief immediately sent a letter

230 | A Banker down the Rabbit Hole