Yet another scamster, Nirav Modi has fled with the bank deposits of this country’s ordinary citizens. Earlier the British had made off with the Kohinoor diamond amongst other crown jewels of India ,but the British were colonisers and their action of looting the wealth of a colony they were unsure of retaining is par for the course. What is distressing is that in the last few years, first Lalit Modi the IPL Czar who took the game of cricket to a new high and violated all the rules of financial transactions fled India in 2010. Then Vijay Mallya the owner of an IPL team, Royal Challengers Bangalore left the country on March 2, 2016 because he owed the public sector banks over Rs 9000 crore in loans. And in January this year Nirav Modi a diamond merchant known to have designed some of the best jewellery for Hollywood film stars and other international celebrities, fled India after leaving behind unpaid loans amounting to Rs 11, 300 crores which he took from foreign and Indian banks. Loans from foreign banks were given to Nirav Modi on the basis of Letters of Undertakings (LoUs) from Indian banks. He did not have to pay any margin money for those loans since the Indian banks stood as guarantors. The bank that bled the most was Punjab National Bank. Nirav Modi was almost like an insider trader and was privy to the Bank’s operating password for Core Banking facilities.
The Punjab National Bank only detected the fraudulent deals on Januray 29 this year and filed a criminal complaint against Nirav Modi but by then he had already left India in early January. Modi is now living it up in a posh hotel in New York much like Mallya is doing so in the UK.
Today the confidence of ordinary depositors in the banking system has taken a beating. They wonder if their hard earned savings are safe in the nationalised or private banks if mega borrowers are allowed to loot and scoot. And while ordinary depositors are subjected to a regular KYC (Know Your Customer) process and have to regularly supply the banks all personal documents, the unscrupulous borrowers get away by violating all the banking norms. The irony of India is that small borrowers are harassed while defaulters escape scrutiny.