Chandigarh: 3 CITCO officials indicted for fraudulent withdrawal of ₹35 lakh bank guarantee
The matter had come to light in January this year when CITCO had gone to forfeit the security and found that the amount had already been withdrawn by the firm, M/s OSCAR Security and Fire Service, in June 2022
An inquiry committee, led by a retired judge, has indicted three officials of Chandigarh Industrial and Tourism Development Corporation (CITCO) for colluding with a private firm to fraudulently withdraw ₹35 lakh bank guarantee.
The matter had come to light in January this year when CITCO had gone to forfeit the security and found that the amount had already been withdrawn by the firm, M/s OSCAR Security and Fire Service, in June 2022. It was also found that CITCO did not possess the original bank guarantee, and only had a coloured photocopy.
Additional district and sessions judge BR Bansal (retd) conducted the inquiry and implicated CITCO’s commercial manager Anil Sharma, clerk Balwinder Kaur and junior assistant Rikkhi Ram. The report was submitted to CITCO managing director Purva Garg, who will now decide on the action to be taken against the three officials.
HT tried to reach out to Garg for comments, but she did not respond.
CITCO had suspended, then reinstated trio
The clerk, Balwinder Kaur, in her statement to the inquiry officer, had said that Anil Kumar and Rikkhi Ram had come to the office and demanded the bank guarantee, stating that it was required for a court case. She further said that the duo had snatched the papers from her hand, and later replaced it with fake bank guarantee.
CITCO had also conducted an internal probe into the bank guarantee case and initially suspended the three officials. However, they were reinstated after two months, and an inquiry was ordered against them. An FIR was also registered against Anil Sharma.
Firm had fraudulently obtained double EPF
No action was, however, taken against some senior officials for the loss of nearly ₹1 crore to CITCO.
Documents in possession of Hindustan Times revealed that in January 2022, the then additional managing director of CITCO, Nitika Pawar, had discovered that M/s OSCAR Security and Fire Service, which had been awarded a contract in 2018 for providing manpower, had fraudulently obtained a double benefit of ₹67 lakh as employees’ provident fund (EPF) for more than 200 employees. Besides collecting the PF amount from CITCO, the company had also received ₹67 lakh PF amount for the same employees from the Central government under Pradhan Mantri Rojgar Protsahan Yojana.
Pawar instructed the officials to forfeit the firm’s bank guarantee of ₹35 lakh, but the officials concerned failed to act. In November 2022, then MD Jaswinder Kaur instructed officials to forfeit the firm’s bank guarantee, but they neglected to take action for almost 18 months. When CITCO officers finally went to encash the bank guarantee of ₹35 lakh in January 2023, it was found that the guarantee had already been encashed by the firm in June 2022.
