DHFL scam: ‘Bandra Books’ under CBI probe in Rs 34,615 crore bank fraud

PTI, Jun 22, 2022, 5:35 PM IST

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New Delhi: The Dewan Housing Finance Limited allegedly maintained 1,81,664 ghost retail loan accounts having a liability of over Rs 14,000 crore which were kept in a parallel set of accounts database known as ‘Bandra Books’, officials said.

The Union Bank of India (UBI) had approached the Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) with its complaint that the non-banking finance company DHFL disbursed loans worth over Rs 14,000 crore as ‘Project Finance’ which were shown as retail loans in their books to project an inflated retail loan portfolio for the company.

Based on this complaint, the probe agency booked then DHFL chairman-cum-managing director Kapil Wadhawan and others in one of the biggest bank frauds in India amounting to over Rs 34,615 crore.

The Securities and Exchange Board of India (SEBI), in its report, had also expressed apprehension that approvals and fund disbursal in respect of Bandra Books were done with nod from Kapil Wadhawan.

According to the complaint, now part of the new FIR, the records of these non-existent retail loans with an outstanding aggregating to Rs 14,095 crore known as ‘Bandra Books’ were maintained in a parallel book of accounts by creating a logical partition in the Enterprise Resource Planning software used for bookkeeping and loan management, officials said.

The parallel database of non-genuine retail loans was maintained by the Senior Vice President (Special Projects) of DHFL Jayesh Khona, who was assisted by Sangeeta Amin and Priya Naik pertained to the Bandra branch of the company — a virtual branch, they said.

“The aforesaid retail loans, referred to as ‘Bandra Books’, were maintained in a separate database in Foxpro Software, against which loans were shown as disbursed by Dewan Housing Finance Limited (DHFL) and were subsequently merged with OLPL (Other Large Project) Loans,” the bank has alleged.

The OLPL category loans were largely carved out of the non-existing retail loans amounting to Rs 14,000 crore, out of which Rs 11,000 crore was transferred to OLPL loans and Rs 3,018 crore was retained under the retail portfolio as unsecured retail loans, it alleged.

It is alleged that Hemant Shah of the accounts department, a relative of Khona, maintained actual details of disbursements made from the UBI account to the promoter entities in a separate accounting system maintained in Tally, the bank has alleged.

It alleged that Khona and his team used to pass fake accounting entries as servicing of interest on the loans by passing debit and credit entries of the same amounts, even though no actual inflow or outflow occurred in the bank accounts of DHFL for such interest servicing.