No proof against Maha bank officials'

Pune: Four months after arresting the top officers of Bank of Maharashtra in a fraud case, the Pune police on Saturday told a local court that they had no evidence against the three officers. The police also informed the court that the officers should be discharged from the cheating case registered against city-based developer D.S. Kulkarni.

The public sector bank’s CEO and managing director Ravindra Marathe, executive director Rajendra Gupta and former chairman and managing director Sushil Muhnot should therefore be discharged, said police.

Assistant commissioner of police, economic offences wing (EOW) Nilesh More filed a report before special EOW judge D.G. Murumkar Saturday, seeking discharge for the three accused.

“During the investigation, no sufficient evidence to file charge sheet against the three accused, Marathe, Gupta and Muhnot, was found. An application seeking discharge is being submitted to exclude the names of the accused from the case,” the report said.

The EOW did not include the name of another accused, Nityanand Desh-pande, a zonal manager of the Bank of Maharashtra, in the discharge plea. All four are currently out on bail. The court is likely to pass order on the discha-rge plea on November 3.

In June, the Pune EOW arrested Marathe and other top officials for allegedly misusing their official positions for sanctioning a loan to Kulka-rni’s construction firm, DSKDL. They allegedly colluded with DSKDL wi-th a “dishonest and fraudulent intention” to sanction the loan, police said.

In May, police had filed a 37,000-page charge sheet against Kulkarni and his wife, accusing them of a scam of Rs 2,043.18 crore by floating nine firms to siphon off funds collected from 33,000 investors and fixed-deposit (FD) holders.

Defence lawyer Harshad Nimbalkar said that poli-ce arrested the bank officials for no reason. “A loan of Rs 600 crore to the DSKDL was given by six banks, which were part of a consortium. In that consortium, Bank of Mahar-ashtra was one of the banks which had given a loan of Rs 100 crore and it had been approved after complete due diligence,” he said.

“One of the investor of DSKDL in his complaint said he and other investors had been cheated previously, So in the present case of cheating and the role of bank, there is no relation at all” Mr Nimbalkar said.