NEW DELHI: The Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) on Oct 11 filed a charge sheet in a Bombay court against the stockbroker, Harshad Meta, and 11 others for defrauding SBI Capital Market of Rs 105.11 crore during 199192.
The CBI said in the charge sheet, filed in the special court of Justice S.N.Variava, that it had been able to trace an amount of Rs 70 crore of this money to the Harshad Mehta group and that the entire endues of this amount had been located.
The charge sheet has been filed a day before the CBI director, K.Vijaya Rama Rao, and five joint directors are to depose before the Joint Parliamentary Committee (JPC) probing the securities scam, ‘The others who have been named in the charge sheet are: Arhwin Mehta, Sudhir Mehta, Hiten Mehta (a broker, unrelated to Harshad), Pankaj V.Shah, Atul Parekh (brokers, R.Sitharaman, the sacked employee of SRI Caps, C.Ravi Kumar, assistant general manager of National Housing Bank, S.Sureshbabu, assistant manager of NHB, Ashok Aggarwal, NHB’s chief manager & dealer of SBI Caps, J. Bandopadhyaya, assistant general manager of SBI Caps and M.S.Srinivasan, manager of funds management cell of State Bank of Saurashira.
According to a CBI spokesman here, in all four deals between July 29, 1992 and April 6, 1992, SBI Caps had entered into an agreement for purchase of UTI units through Harshad Mehta and had issued instructions to the securities divisions of the SBI main branch for debiting their account and making payments to the respective counterparties, namely UCO Bank, Canfina and NHB. The charge sheet stated that Sitharaman, of the securities division of SBI Caps, debited the account of SBI Caps as per instructions but instead of making payments to the counter parties, credited the amount straight into the accounts of Harshad Mehta in the SBI main branch and the ANZ, Grindlays Bank in most cases.
Article extracted from this publication >> October 15, 1993
