Bank officer among 5 held in multi-crore loan ‘scam’

The crime branch of the Jammu and Kashmir Police has arrested five accused, including a former manager of the Jammu and Kashmir Bank, in connection with an alleged multi-crore-rupee loan scam here, the agency said on Tuesday.

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The case was registered in 2023 on a written complaint from Mohammad Shakeel, the chief manager of the supervision and control division of the bank’s Jammu zonal office. The complainant alleged that Saleem Yousuf Bhatti, a contractual employee of the Integrated Watershed Management Programme (IWMP), Poonch, and others got the inactive accounts of the watershed committee in the bank’s Lassana branch in Surankote activated.

The accused allegedly got the nomenclature of the accounts changed, issued fake salary certificates and confirmation letters to different non-existing employees and managed to get personal loans, cash-credit loans and car loans by posing themselves as government employees, a spokesperson of the crime branch said.

They first deposited money through different banks in the accounts of the watershed committee and the fake accounts opened by them, issued fake authority letters instructing the branches to disburse and credit the salary in the individual accounts of the accused and thus, managed to fraudulently obtain loans amounting to Rs 5 crore from different branches of the Jammu and Kashmir Bank, causing a huge wrongful loss to the bank.

Taking its investigation forward, the crime branch arrested five accused — then manager (scale-II) of the bank’s Rajouri branch Jatinder Singh (now demoted) of Jammu, impersonators Mohammad Kabir, Mohammad Zafeer Khan and Zafar Iqbal of Poonch and Mohammad Shakeel of Rajouri, the spokesperson said.