PNB received the vigilance award in October from the Central Vigilance Commission.
Just four months before it reported a massive scam worth Rs 11,400 crore by its former employees to benefit billionaire jeweller Nirav Modi and others,
Punjab National Bank (PNB) was honoured with the Vigilance Excellence Award for what was viewed as its success in acting against corruption.
PNB received the award in October from the Central Vigilance Commission (CVC) for "Outstanding Achievement in Timely Completion of Disciplinary Proceedings".
Chief Vigilance Commissioner KV Chowdary, who then presented the award to PNB's Chief Vigilance Officer SK Nagpal, has now summoned a dozen officials of the same bank for questioning in the Nirav Modi scandal and to establish the mechanism of the scam that has jolted the banking sector.
Two more Vigilance Excellence Awards were also given to PNB by the Institute of Public Enterprise in Hyderabad in 2015 and last year. That makes it three in three years.
Picking up on the irony, Congress leader Manish Tewari said: "This is the kind of vigilance being exercised in the banking sector."
PNB is still reeling from revelations that two officials including a former manager engineered the colossal swindle between 2011 and 2017, and what has emerged as India's biggest banking fraud remained undetected until last month.
The officials allegedly misused the SWIFT interbank messaging system for years, shared passwords with Nirav Modi's employees and didn't record transactions in the books, which, investigators say, points to a complete breakdown in internal checks and balances.
The man at the centre of the investigation is Gokulnath Shetty, a branch deputy manager who worked at the same Mumbai branch of PNB from 2010 to 2017, despite normal bank practices of regular rotations.
Gokulnath Shetty is accused of issuing fake Letters of Undertaking - or guarantees sent to other banks so that they would provide loans to a customer. These letters were then sent to overseas branches of banks, which lent money to Nirav Modi's company and others.
According to the CBI, Gokulnath Shetty did not record the transactions the bank's internal system, which was made easier because PNB's internal software system is not linked with SWIFT.
At least 150 such fake guarantees were issued during a seven-year period, according to a CBI official.