Mumbai: Rakesh Wadhawan denied bail in EOW's PMC case

Housing Development and Infrastructure Limited (HDIL) promoter Rakesh Wadhawan’s bail application was rejected by a sessions court on Tuesday in the fraud case concerning Punjab and Maharashtra Co-operative Bank (PMC) lodged by the Economic Offences Wing (EOW) of the Mumbai Police. 

Wadhawan has other cases on him, including a money laundering case connected to the bank where the Enforcement Directorate (ED) is the prosecuting agency, in which also he has not secured bail. Earlier, assets belonging to HDIL that had been pledged as collateral to the bank had been provisionally attached. 

The FIR filed in the case in Sep 2019 had pegged the fraud at over Rs. 4,600 crores and had alleged that around Rs. 2,145 crores had been transferred to the personal accounts of Rakesh Wadhawan and his son Sarang Wadhawan, also a promoter of HDIL. The father and son duo had been arrested under offences under the Indian Penal Code relating to cheating, criminal breach of trust by a banker, forgery, using a forged document as genuine and criminal conspiracy. As the probe progressed, the loss to the bank was pegged at over Rs. 6,100 crores.

As per the EOW, PMC had masked 44 problematic loan accounts of loans extended to HDIL. This was done by tampering with the core banking system and fictitious bank accounts had also been created to hide the irregularities. In a second charge sheet in the case that was filed this year, the EOW has named 15 bank employees as accused of aiding and abetting the fraud. There are a total of 44 accused in the case.