By IANS,
New York : Anil Anand, former chief financial officer of Allied Deals Inc, was sentenced to the time served – seven months in prison – and ordered to forfeit $600 million and pay restitution of $683.6 million on charges of his involvement in a massive metals trading fraud that cost international banks at least $600 million.
Anand, 46, of New Jersey, pleaded guilty to five counts, including conspiracy and bank fraud, in December 2002 and agreed to cooperate with the government.
He testified in 2004 in New York against six co-defendants and in London in 2007 at the trial of Virendra Rastogi, who controlled Allied Deals with his brother Narendra and three others.
His sentence, which otherwise would have been up to 30 years, was reduced by the Manhattan federal court because of his cooperation with investigators.
Anand admitted participating in the Ponzi scheme by inducing banks to issue hundreds of millions of dollars in loans.
They posed as metals brokers to secure loans from a wide range of US and international banks, including FleetBoston Financial, PNC Financial Services Group, J.P. Morgan Chase and Dresdner Bank.
Hundreds of metal transactions upon which the loans were based simply did not exist.
Anand, the Rastogi brothers, and their co-conspirators had set up an elaborate network of hundreds of sham, nominee companies around the world – which they called “group companies” – to serve as dummy buyers of metal from Allied Deals so that the defendants could get loans from the victim banks.
The conspirators used loan proceeds from one victim bank to make the loan payments required by another victim bank.
Fifteen people were arrested in the US in connection with the fraud. Nine, including Anand, pleaded guilty; five were found guilty at trial; and one was acquitted. Two defendants in the US case have not been apprehended.