Just months before the Nirav Modi scam came to the limelight, Punjab National Bank (PNB) quietly transferred two employees, both internal auditors posted at the lender’s Hong Kong and Dubai branches after they exposed a deep fault within its banking system.
Top sources within the investigative agencies probing the matter told a daily that the PNB action, against its own staff, was a result of a concurrent audit, initiated in March 2017, in which they had revealed anomalies of a huge scale.
It has been revealed that VP Singh, PNB’s auditor posted at Hong Kong was sent to conduct an audit at the Dubai branch, while GS Agarwal of the Dubai branch was sent to Hong Kong to complete the concurrent audit.
“Both the officers had flagged various misdeeds including massive NPAs in the state-owned lender’s overseas branch. It appears the report was also sent to the PNB headquarters in Delhi. Subsequently, these two officers who exposed the wrongdoings in the banking system were told to return to India in August 2017. What is surprising is the fact that these two PNB officers had not completed their foreign assignment, which was for three years,” a source revealed.
It is believed that VP Singh and GS Agarwal had pointed out irregularities in granting of loans to companies without due diligence, sanctioning of letters of undertaking (LoUs) and had exposed a list of businessmen, who were taking the bank for a ride.
The two honest officers were subsequently given punishment posting just a few months before the Nirav Modi scam case surfaced in the public domain.
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