By Sharat Pradhan, IANS,
Lucknow : Two senior officials of the State Bank of India (SBI) were summoned earlier this week by the union finance ministry and the parliamentary committee on banking in connection with the fake currency racket in Uttar Pradesh, official sources said.
Shiv Kumar, Uttar Pradesh chief general manager, was asked to explain how a cashier of the bank’s tiny Domariyaganj branch could carry out a multi-crore fake currency racket all alone.
Kumar was accompanied by O.P.Bhatt, SBI chairman.
According to finance ministry sources, Kumar was asked why Sudhakar Tripathi – the cashier who is the main suspect in the case – was allowed to continue at the same post for nearly 18 years.
Kumar has been in Lucknow for four years and reportedly his attention was earlier drawn to the fishy goings-on in the Domariyaganj currency chest.
“We have reason to believe that Tripathi enjoyed the patronage of some high-ups in the bank who allowed him to have a field day in Domariyaganj,” remarked a senior ministry official.
Kumar remained evasive. “The matter is under investigation, so I am not going to give you anything on the issue. I cannot even tell you how much currency has so far been found to be fake,” he told IANS.
He also declined to explain why he did not visit Domariyaganj when suspicions about the racket were aroused earlier. “No comments,” was his flat reply.
Currently in police custody, Tripathi was identified as the alleged kingpin in the scam that involved clandestine replacement of genuine notes by fakes in the bank’s currency chest.
The chest was the storehouse for all currency received from the Reserve Bank of India (RBI) for all banks in Domariyaganj town in Basti district close to the India-Nepal border.
The unearthing of the scam has its roots in last month’s arrest of four people with wads of fake currency notes in the little town.
“Sustained interrogation of Abid Sheikh alias ‘Pundit’, who was among the arrested people, gave our cops the leads to SBI bank cashier Sudhakar Tripathi,” Brij Lal, state additional director general of police told IANS here.
Lal does not rule out the involvement of more people, including some Reserve Bank of India (RBI) officials, in the scam.
He said: “I am told that RBI is supposed to carry out inspection and scanning of all currency chests every six months. If such an inspection was carried out in the proper prescribed manner, I am sure that a fake currency scam of this magnitude would have been detected.”
“After all, so many crores (tens of millions) worth of fake notes could not have been replaced from the currency chest overnight,” he said.
He was also critical of SBI big-wigs for their “non-cooperation” in the matter.
Meanwhile, the Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI), that was already investigating another fake currency scam, was yet to take over the case from the state police.
The Uttar Pradesh government had shot off a letter to the central government in this regard about ten days ago.