New India Bank case: Wanted accused surrenders after a month

A wanted accused in the Rs 122-crore embezzlement case at New India Cooperative Bank, who had been evading police for a month, surrendered on Sunday morning, an official said.

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Arunachalam Ullahanathan Maruthuvar (62) was immediately placed under arrest by the Economic Offences Wing (EOW), which is probing the bank fraud. He was produced in a court that remanded him in police custody until March 18, the official said.

This is the sixth arrest in the case.

According to police, Arunachalam received nearly Rs 30 crore of the misappropriated funds from the prime accused, Hitesh Mehta, the cooperative bank’s former general manager and head of accounts.

The anti-financial crime unit on Friday arrested the wanted accused and civil contractor Kapil Dedhia from Vadodara in neighbouring Gujarat. A court here has remanded him in police custody till March 19. Police said Rs 12 crore of the embezzled funds was credited to his account.

According to the police, Rs 122 crore was siphoned off from the safes of New India Cooperative Bank’s Prabhadevi and Goregaon offices in Mumbai.

Besides the arrest of six persons, a few more individuals have also been named as wanted accused, including the bank’s former chairman Hiren Bhanu and his wife, ex-vice-chairperson Gauri Bhanu, who fled abroad just before the scam came to light.

Earlier this week, the Mumbai police conducted a polygraph test on prime accused Mehta. The test, also called a lie detector test, was conducted on Mehta at the Forensic Science Laboratory in the city’s Kalina area.

An EOW team would also meet senior staffers of the Reserve Bank of India to collect information about why the central bank conducted an inspection on February 12, which uncovered the discrepancies, and not prior to that, an official had said.