Bank chose to ignore Puri's dealings: Victim

GURGAON: Sanjeev Aggarwal, a high net worth investor, who was a victim of Shiv Raj Puri’s ponzi scheme told TOI that he was hurt by the fact that Citibank chose to ignore Puri’s dealings despite being such a high-profile bank. He termed the scam as a systemic failure and said that everyone in the bank, including its top CEO in the US, were responsible for the mess.
Aggarwal said that he had not invested in Puri’s scheme and that the relationship manager fudged details of his investment to make money.
According to him, Puri made him sign on blank documents for moving financial instruments but instead of transferring funds from his accounts to the schemes floated by financial institutions, he invested them in the market from his own accounts.
On how unaccounted money landed from his account to Prem Nath’s account, Aggarwal said: “I have never met Prem Nath and have written to the bank. These are all unauthorized inflows.”
Aggarwal claims that he has been in touch with Citibank’s country manager Amrita Farmahan (since first week of December) but recently the bank has not reverted to any of his queries.
“I have named the top officials in my complaint since a fraud to this tune is not possible without the knowledge of higher ups,” Aggarwal said on Wednesday.
According to Aggarwal, he came to know of the fraud during the first week of December but waited for the bank to make good of his losses and hence there was a delay in approaching the police. “I received a call from the branch that my relationship manager for the past three years, Shiv Raj Puri, was on leave. That is when I noticed discrepancies in my account.”
Aggarwal said that at one point, the bank was keen on settlement but then they stopped responding to his mails and queries. He claimed that he lost Rs 33 crore in the scam.
Aggarwal was introduced to the main accused in 2007 by senior executives in the branch and Puri had been managing his accounts. “He used to send us e-statements of my accounts from a bonafide Citibank account. The statements were so comprehensive that we never doubted them,” recalled Aggarwal.
When asked why he never bothered to compare the hard copies of his bank account statements to those mailed to him, Aggarwal said, “I used to give the hard copies to my chartered accountant and I used to go through the e-statements. Hence, he never drew a comparison. For two years all was well, but it was only in the past one year that Puri started withdrawing funds from my account,” said the victim.