PNB scam: CBI court sends 3 bank officials to police custody till 3 March; Nirav Modi's bungalow searched

Mumbai: A special CBI court on Tuesday sent three Punjab National Bank officials arrested in connection with the Rs 11,300-crore fraud in police custody till 3 March. Those arrested on Monday are Bechhu Tiwari, Chief Manager in charge of Forex Department, Yashwant Joshi, a Scale II Manager in the same department and Praful Sawant, a Scale I officer in the Exports Section. [caption id=“attachment_4357617” align=“alignleft” width=“380”] Representational image. News18.[/caption]

They were held three days after the first arrests were made in the sensational case on 17 July and presented in the CBI court this afternoon.

On Saturday, the CBI had arrested retired PNB officials—former Deputy General Manager Gokulnath Shetty and single window Operator Manoj Kharat—besides Hemant Bhat, an authorised signatory for the Nirav Modi Group. They are in police custody until 3 March. Tiwari was entrusted with supervising the work of Shetty and his team and to ensure entry of authorised SWIFT messages only into the system. Joshi was responsible for ensuring that daily reports of SWIFT and CBS entries were prepared, while Sawant was tasked with checking these SWIFT messages daily and reporting them to the bosses. In the ongoing investigations, the Central Bureau of Investigation has interrogated around a dozen more PNB officials, mainly from the PNB’s flagship Brady House Branch which has now emerged as the epicentre of the massive fraud. The branch office was raided on Sunday and Monday and even sealed for a few hours on Monday to enable the CBI team to carry out its investigations. A CBI team also swooped down on a farmhouse of absconding billionaire diamond trader Nirav Modi at the famed Kihim beach resort in Raigad. The bungalow is constructed over nearly one-and-a-half acres, about two km from Alibaug, which houses bungalows, resorts and farmhouses of some of India’s richest personalities, businessmen, film stars and others, accessible by an hour’s catamaran ride from the Gateway of India.