Subhash Shankar Parab, a close associate of fugitive jeweller Nirav Modi, was deported from Egypt today by the Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI), official sources said.
Mr Parab, who fled to Cairo in 2018, landed in Mumbai early this morning after deportation, officials said, adding that he will be produced in a CBI court at 12 pm.
He is the key accused in the Rs 7,000 crore Nirav Modi bank fraud case. Mr Parab, who was the Deputy General Manager (Finance) in Firestar Diamond, could spill the beans on the country's biggest financial scam in the state-run Punjab National Bank (PNB) allegedly perpetrated by Nirav Modi and Mehul Choksi with a combined loss of Rs 13,000 crore, officials said.
While Mr Modi is in a London prison after repeated denial of bail and is contesting extradition to India, Mr Choksi had taken the citizenship of Antigua and Barbuda in 2017 using the Citizenship by Investment programme even before fleeing India in the first week of January 2018.
The investigations revealed that messages for fraudulent Letters of Undertaking (LoU) were sent to overseas banks by misusing Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunications (SWIFT), an international messaging system for banking, and without making their subsequent entries in PNB's internal software 'Finacle', thus bypassing any scrutiny of such funds in the bank.
An LoU is a guarantee given by an issuing bank to Indian banks having branches abroad to grant a short-term credit to the applicant. In case of default, the bank issuing the LoU has to pay the liability to the credit-giving bank along with accruing interest.
The companies of Mr Modi and Mr Choksi took loans from banks abroad on the basis of these LoUs but did not repay them, thus transferring the liability on PNB.
It is alleged that senior officials of the PNB did not implement the circulars and caution notices issued by the Reserve Bank of India (RBI) regarding safeguarding of the SWIFT operation and misrepresented the factual position to the apex bank.
Reconciliation of the Core Banking Solutions (CBS) and SWIFT messages was not done despite repeated RBI circulars, caution notices and questionnaires, the CBI has alleged.
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