The Punjab National Bank (PNB) has initiated criminal action against its employees who were involved in the ₹11,500 crore fraud that took place in one of its Mumbai branches, its MD and CEO Sunil Mehta told the media here on Thursday.
The state-run bank has also initiated an inquiry into the supervisory lapses that allowed the crime, Mr. Mehta said. “Our bank has not only complained against the customer, but the staff who was involved, Mr. Shetty and another employee, have been made a part of the criminal complaint,” he said.
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Supervisory lapses
“We have also taken action on the supervisory lapses,” Mr. Mehta informed. “We have suspended some, and our inquiry is on. We are not going to allow any wrongdoing to continue and will remove this cancer. From 2011, this cancer has continued. We are doing surgery and are removing it.”
According to Mr. Mehta, the bank would honour all its bona fide commitments.
“Whatever the regulator says, we will definitely comply,” he said. “We are already in discussion with all the lenders. If the entire onus is on us, we are not going to back away from it.”
Mr. Mehta expressed confidence that the bank would emerge stronger. He urged investigating agencies to complete their work quickly so that the way forward could be determined.
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“Our own bank was the first to detect the fraud and tell the law enforcement agencies,” Mr. Mehta said. “As soon as we found out about the incident, we investigated it, and as soon as we could verify the facts, we went to the law enforcement agencies to book the culprits and take strong legal action.”
The incident was internally detected, he said, in the third week of January 2018 and was investigated for 3-4 days. The bank went to the CBI on January 29 and the FIR was booked on January 30.
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