City Limouzine Investment finance fraud

Senior congress leader and former chief minister Oommen Chandy on Tuesday gave his statement before a special investigation team of the crime branch on his remark that he was blackmailed in the solar scam.

Police recorded Chandy's statement based on a complaint filed by BJP leader K Surendran seeking a probe into Chandy's remark in this regard.

The scam had rocked the previous Congress-led UDF government headed by Chandy after reports surfaced in 2013 that some of his staff were involved in alleged cheating of several persons of crores of rupees by Saritha S Nair and her accomplice Biju Radhakrishnan by offering solar panel solutions.

A judicial commission, which probed the matter, had submitted its report last year. It had indicted Chandy and some other UDF leaders in connection with the scam.

The CPI-M-led LDF government headed by chief minister Pinarayi Vijayan, which accepted the report, had announced registering cases against Chandy and a dozen senior congress politicians, besides placing it in the assembly at a special one-day session.

Soon after the report was placed, Chandy at a press meet claimed that he had done no wrong, but remarked that he was subjected to 'blackmail' in the case.

BJP state general secretary K Surendran filed a complaint with the state police chief to probe the matter. 

Taking serious note of discrepancies in published results, Yogi Adityanath-led BJP government in Uttar Pradesh has ordered a probe and suspended Human Resources (HR) Head Sandeep Saxena, National Health Mission (NHM). This is in connection with glaring irregularities detected in results of written exams for the recruitment of contractual staff nurses and other staff by NHM in Uttar Pradesh.

Taking note of complaints by candidates, the Health Minister Dr Siddharth Nath Singh on Wednesday suspended HR Head of the NHM Sandeep Saxena and ordered an inquiry for result declared on December 22.

“It was lapse on part of the human resources department of the National Health Mission. We have placed the HR Head under suspension. New cut off marks are being worked out and the state government has ordered for releasing revised results as per the new cut off for all categories,” said Dr Singh.

Acting on the state government’s directions, the NHM Director Pankaj Kumar said that the new cut off marks for the general and reserved category candidates have been set and revised results would be declared shortly.

After media highlighed irregularities, the NHM Director admitted discrepancies in the results declared on December 22 and blamed the HR department. He said that the cut off for reserved candidates should not be as low as 3 out of 90. Similarly, he said that the cut off for the general category candidates was also very high.

“We are setting new cut off marks for both general and reserved category candidates to remove the anomalies. The result would be revised as per the new cut off and the revised results would be declared shortly,” said Durector.

After inviting applications from the candidates, the NHM had conducted a written exam on November 5 2017 for 4688 contractual staff, nurse, ANM, PRO and lab technicians etc. The result of the written exams was declared on December 22.

Many candidates were shocked when they found that reserved category candidate obtaining as low as 3 out of 90 marks were declared selected while general candidates getting 64 out of 90 were failed in the written exams.

The result soon went viral on social media with candidates alleging recruitment scam in NHM and foul play in evaluation of results. Candidates who failed to make the cut had threatened to file a case against the NHM authorities.

When contacted, the Principal Secretary Medical Health and Family Welfare Prashant Trivedi had initially denied any bungling in results but was forced to change tune later.

After much outrage the state government has decided to withheld the result and ordered the state unit of NHM to publish the revised result at the earliest after correcting all the alleged discrepancies.


The written exam for about 4688 contractual posts of Staff Nurse, ANM, PRO, Lab Technicians etc was held on November 5 2017 all over the state. The results for the same were declared on December 22. But after detection of irregularities, candidates are now raising questions over the evaluation of examination copies. The Principal Secretary Health Prashant Trivedi has assured to look into the anomalies brought to his knowledge. “I have issued directions to check results again,” said Trivedi.


Trivedi said that written exam was only a part of the selection process and only those who have cleared the interviews and other technical processes will be selected for the NHM. “The final result and selection process are yet to be completed,” he clarified.  “Only those candidates would be selected who cleared all the selection criterion. We will ensure that no bogus candidates gets job under the current NHM recruitment drive to fulfil existing vacancies,” he added.

Candidates have alleged glaring discrepancies in the results declared for recruitment of about 4700 nurses and other staff under the National Health Mission (NHM) in Uttar Pradesh.

In the results declared on December 22 for the written test, those who got 64 out of 90 marks were declared failed while those who obtained merely 3 and 8 marks were declared passed. The results went viral on social media indicating towards a possible scam in the recruitment process. 

A Romanian couple has been nabbed from Delhi in connection with the debit card skimming case in which almost 100 people who used an ATM in Mumbai's central suburb of Mulund lost money from their accounts which collectively amounted to Rs 38 lakh.

According to the Navghar police, they had earlier nabbed two local men who were instrumental in providing logistical support to the foreigners who skimmed cards at the ATM and withdrew money in Delhi.

ATM skimming involves thieves using hidden electronics to steal personal information stored on cards. Think of it as identity theft of debit cards.

The police said the accused foreign nationals came to the country on a tourist visa from Romania and had installed a skimmer — a thrice in the ATM in Mulund. After copying card data, they started withdrawing money from ATMs in Delhi and Uttar Pradesh.

"We got our first lead when we got CCTV footage of the foreigners along with the two locals. We apprehended the latter. During their interrogation, they pointed us to the foreigners. We tracked the foreigners using their phones, and our team in Delhi nabbed them. We have also got CCTV footage of the time when they are withdrawing money," said a police officer

"The two locals were also involved in a similar case in Kurla two years ago in which three Romanian nationals were arrested," he added.

The police got in touch with the Romanian embassy in New Delhi, seeking details of the recently nabbed couple's passports.

As many as 100people who used an ATM in Mulund were in for a shock when they got text messages saying money had been withdrawn using their cards, even when the cards were in their possession. The victims had approached Navghar police station and lodged a case.

The accused couple will be brought to the city on Friday. This is the second instance in two weeks where Romanian nationals were found to have been instrumental in committing cyber fraud.

Last Friday, the Pune police nabbed three Romanian nationals for allegedly cloning ATM cards and withdrawing money to the tune of Rs 28 lakh from over 100 bank accounts after stealing details of more than 1,000 cards. They had also used skimmers.

Earlier, the Mumbai police had arrested a Bulgarian national involved in skimming and cloning the cards.

The CBI busted a railway ticketing racket on Wednesday by arresting one of its own programmers. The scam impacted lakhs of citizens across the country as many failed to get confirmed tickets, especially tatkal ones, because of it. It also exposes the vulnerability of Indian Railway Catering and Tourism Corporation (IRCTC) software.

Ajay Garg, an assistant programmer with the CBI since 2012, was arrested from Delhi. His associate Anil Kumar Gupta was nabbed from Uttar Pradesh’s Jaunpur and is being brought to Delhi on transit remand.

The agency has registered a case of criminal conspiracy under Sections of the Information Technology Act for making an illegal railway ticketing software. The accused had developed a tatkal (ticketing at short notice) software with distributor Gupta. They sold the software to tour and travel operators across the country.

Travel operators using this software booked tickets in advance and created a shortage.

Garg received payments through Bitcoin and hawala routes. Before joining the CBI, he worked as a programmer with the IRCTC during 2007-2011, and knew the vulnerabilities of the ticketing software of the Railways. Garg knew that the Railways software allowed him to book hundreds of tickets in the morning. He used 800 to 1,000 customer IDs at one go.

The CBI has also identified 10 travel agents who were using this software. They include three of Mumbai and seven of Jaunpur.

Garg was using proxy and foreign servers to remove any trail.

It was also alleged that Garg was collecting money for the use of the software by certain booking agents and had amassed huge wealth. It was also revealed that Gupta on behalf of Garg was allegedly receiving money from dealers for the use of the software through Bitcoin and hawala networks.

Searches were conducted at 14 places, including Delhi, Mumbai and Jaunpur, which resulted in recoveries of Rs 89.42 lakh, gold jewellery valued at Rs 61.29 lakh, 15 laptops, 15 hard disks, 52 mobile phones, 24 SIM cards, 10 notebooks, 6 routers, 4 dongles, 19 pen drives and other incriminating material from the premises of the accused and others.

The Enforcement Directorate (ED) on Wednesday provisionally attached fresh assets valued at over Rs 177 crore in connection with the money laundering case against NSEL.

The officials have attached 10 immovable properties of Surender Gupta of PD Agro Processors Pvt Ltd and Dunar Foods Ltd, a major defaulter of NSEL having a market value of Rs 177.33 crore under the Prevention of Money Laundering Act.

The total worth of attached assets in the case stands at Rs 2,890 crore.

The ED officials said the company, P D Agro Processors Pvt Ltd, has fraudulently obtained huge funds from NSEL by trading on the exchange platform against the non-existent/fictitious sale of their commodity, which is paddy/rice. The money trail has revealed that a huge chunk of proceeds of crime has been transferred to M/s Dunar Foods Ltd, a sister concern of PD Agro Processors Pvt Ltd."

The ED, along with the Economic Offences Wing of the Mumbai Police, had registered a criminal case in 2013 under the PMLA to probe NSEL and others associated with it for defrauding 13,000 investors to the tune of Rs 5,600 crore.

The Pune police arrested three Romanian nationals for cloning ATM cards with the help of skimmer and withdrawing nearly Rs 28 lakh from 138 accounts within eight days. Police say the fraudsters got ATM card details of 1,030 people – all of whom had withdrawn money from PNB ATM at Pashan in October.

Pune police nabbed the three from Vasai and suspect they are part of a global fraud. They have been identified as Erima Dragos Junete (26), Lazar Alim Kresti (22) and Balan Floria Christinel (44).

The fraud came to light when bank manager of Punjab National Bank's Pashan circle approached police stating that money of their depositors was withdrawn without their knowledge.

Deputy Commissioner of Police (Zone III), Ganesh Shinde, said, "We found that the fraudsters used a skimmer at the ATM center to steal confidential information belonging to the authentic ATM card holders."

Assistant police inspector Sanjay Thenge of Chatushrungi police station, said, "The skimmer is a device that can be attached where an ATM card is inserted to withdraw money. When a card is inserted, the skimmer's sensor copies the confidential details. The fraudsters also used a transparent keypad, with the help of which they were able to decipher the password of the ATM cards."

Senior police inspector Dayanand Dhome, in charge of Chatushrungi police station, said "In the span of eight days. the fraudsters managed to withdraw nearly Rs 28 lakh from 138 accounts. Acting on a tip-off, we sent a team to Vasai and asked our team in Bangalore to join them. On Tuesday, after the fraudsters withdrew some money from an ATM in Vasai, we managed to catch them red-handed."

The arrested trio has been sent to police custody till December 28.

In a similar case in Mumbai, Navghar police are probing the case of cloning and skimming at the ATM kiosk of a private bank in Mulund. A bank user's card details were compromised and money withdrawn illegally. Mumbai police has dispatched a team to Delhi and Ghaziabad to nab the fraudsters.

The police source claimed that they have CCTV footage of the suspects, who installed the skimmer machine at the ATM machine, and withdrew money from the accounts of people in Delhi and Ghaziabad.

As many as 40 people, who used the ATM in Mulund, were shocked after their card details were used to withdraw money while the cards were in their possession. All the victims had approached Navghar police station on Monday and case was registered.

As the controversial Panama Papers continue to make headlines, a look at scandals that uncovered a global network of financial laundering.

HSBC
In 2008, Herve Falciani - an employee with HSBC Suisse - stole details of 1,30,000 customers who had secret accounts with the bank. The data, leaked to the press in 2015, revealed that HSBC had aided clients in over 200 countries evade taxes on accounts worth nearly $119 billion.

Individual investigations in countries like the US also found that the bank's 'laundering list' of clients included Mexican drug cartels and rogue nations. While HSBC didn't face criminal charges, it was fined 40 million Swiss francs by Geneva for "organisational deficiencies".

Satyam Computer Services
In 2009, the company's founder B Ramalinga Raju confessed to cooking the company's books to the tune of Rs 7,136 crore. The Enforcement Directorate also charged Raju and his cohorts for diverting several hundred crores from the accounts of Satyam towards investments for another company called Maytas (an inversion of 'Satyam'). An RBI official told the media in 2009 that, "In all, there is at least Rs 600 crore in six bank accounts in Mauritius that were linked to the Satyam scam." In 2015, Raju was sentenced to prison and fined Rs 5.5 crore.

In March this year, Bangladesh's central bank reported that $100 million had been stolen from its account at the US Federal Reserve by cyber criminals. $81 million of that money was traced to the Philippines, where it was believed to have been remitted into the accounts of three casinos. Another $20 million had reportedly been transferred to Sri Lanka. In response, anti-money laundering officials in Philippines began a formal investigation into local institutions, which had abetted the illegal movement of these funds while Bangladesh's central banker Atiur Rahman resigned.

A team of CBI officials on Saturday raided the Srijan Mahila Vikas Sahyog Samiti (SMVSS) office at Sabour in connection with the multi-crore scam related to transfer of government funds to the bank accounts of the NGO.
During its six-hour raid, the CBI, which took up the investigation from the special investigation team of Economic Offences Unit, interrogated SMVSS employees, including its assistant manager Sunita Mishra, accountant Bindu Thakur and others. The team gathered vital clues about the modus operandi of the scam adopted by the SMVSS, government officials, bank employees, netas and businessmen, who exploited government money parked in different banks.
The CBI team also gathered information from the hidden files at the SMVSS office, sources said, adding officials of the central probe agency took note of several photographs of the state government officials, politicians, businessmen and self-styled social workers with SMVSS founder late Manorama Devi, her daughter-in-law and present secretary of the NGO Priya Kumar alias Rajni Priya and son Amit Kumar.

Those under CBI lens are Arun Kumar, district welfare officer, Arun Kumar Singh, retired chief manager of Bank of Baroda, Prem Kumar (stenographer of Bhagalpur DM), Rakesh Yadav, Rakesh Jha, Ajay Pandey (officials of Indian Bank), Satish Jha, Sarita Jha (Srijan), Banshidhar Jha (proprietor of a printing press), Binod Singh (driver of Ajay Pandey), Atul Kumar Raman (Bank of Baroda), Pankaj Kumar Jha (cooperative officer, Supaul), Vijay Kumar Gupta (Banka Central Cooperative Bank) and retired branch manager of Cooperative Bank Sudhanshu Kumar Das.
Former land acquisition officer and retired ADM Rajiv Ranjan Singh, secretary of SMVSS Priya Kumar, Amit Kumar (husband of Priya Kumari), expelled BJP leader Bipin Sharma, RLSP leader Dipak Verma, businessmen P K Ghosh, N V Raju, Kishore Ghosh and managing committee members of the NGO, including its president Subhalaxmi Prasad, Seema Devi, Jasima Khatoon, Rajrani Verma, Aparna Verma, Rubi Kumari, Rani Devi, Sunita Devi and Suna Devi are also under CBI scanner.

Sources said CBI officials have prepared inventories of the files of different government departments besides seizing pen-drives, computers, hard-disks and incriminating documents from the offices and business establishments of the absconding accused persons.
The district administration officials refused to comment on the CBI raid.

Former world billiards champion Michael Ferreira and three others accused in a case of Rs 400-crore alleged fraud involving the multi-level-marketing company QNet have been taken into custody by Hyderabad Police and brought here from Mumbai.

A Hyderabad Police team had last week submitted an application seeking their custody in connection with the case registered by them.

A Mumbai court then granted transit remand and the Hyderabad Police took them into custody.

"The four directors of the company, including Michael Ferreira, have been brought to Hyderabad from Mumbai on warrant," a senior police official attached to Central Crime Station (CCS), a wing of Hyderabad Police, said today.

They have been brought here as part of further investigation and will be interrogated, he said.

The Mumbai Police's Economic Offences Wing (EOW) had taken them into custody on September 30 this year in connection with the QNet case.

The EOW has so far arrested 19 persons in the case.

QNet and its franchisee firms allegedly sold products such as magnetic disks with 'healing' properties, herbal medicines and holiday schemes. The company is accused of using the banned 'binary pyramid' model in its marketing schemes, apart from duping the investors.

The FIR was registered in Mumbai in August 2013 under the Prize, Chits and Money Circulation Schemes (Banning) Act, 1978 and Maharashtra Protection of Interest of Depositors Act.

Special public prosecutor Pradeep Gharat had earlier told the court in Mumbai that Ferreira held 80 per cent shares in a franchisee of Hong Kong-based QNet.

QNet ran a 'Ponzi scheme', seeking investments between Rs 30,000 to Rs 7.5 lakh, the prosecutor had said, adding the investors never got the high returns they were promised.

The money earned by QNet was "laundered" and diverted out of the country, Gharat had told the court, adding that Ferreira's interrogation was necessary to find its "destination".

It has come to light that several cases have been registered against QNet and its earlier companies in Tamil Nadu, Karnataka, Andhra Pradesh, Maharashtra, Delhi and Telangana states, Mohanty said.

Ferreira is a director of the accused company Vihaan Direct Selling India Pvt Ltd, which is a master franchise of M/s QNet in India.

The four accused will be produced in a local court and police will file a petition seeking their custody for further interrogation, the DCP said.

Police is also probing into the allegations that QNet cheated unemployed persons and software engineers on the pretext of providing employment and business, he added.

Around 60 complaints have been received in the city against the company, police said.

HIGHLIGHTS

• The SC directed the CBI to probe how, while 1,400 acres were proposed to be acquired in 2009, only 87 acres were actually acquired, leaving the rest to builders and colonisers to purchase.
• The bench agreed with the landowners' counsel who said the acquisition was a colourable exercise and a misuse of powers vested under the land acquisition law.

NEW DELHI: The Supreme Court on Wednesday ordered a CBI probe into the then Bhupinder Singh Hooda government's decision to notify acquisition of 1,400 acres of land in Gurugram allegedly to help builders and colonisers at the cost of farmers and landowners in 2009.
Dismissing a Haryana government appeal against the 2014 judgment of the Punjab and Haryana high court, a bench of Justices Arun Mishra and Mohan M Shantanagoudar directed the CBI to probe how, while 1,400 acres were proposed to be acquired in 2009, only 87 acres were actually acquired, leaving the rest to builders and colonisers to purchase.
Asking CBI to file its report before the court in six months, the bench agreed with the landowners' counsel, Jasbir Singh Malik, who said the acquisition was a colourable exercise and a misuse of powers vested under the land acquisition law.
On June 2, 2009, the Haryana government issued a notification intending to acquire 1,400 acres in villages Badshapur, Behrampur, Nangli Umarpura, Tigara, Ullahwas, Kadarpur, Ghatta and Medwas in Sohna tehsil of Gurugram district for development of "residential sectors 58 to 63 and residential-commercial sectors 65 to 67 in Gurugram as shown in development plan under Haryana Urban Development Authority Act".

This was questioned by a large number of landowners after they found that the final notification drastically curtailed the acquisition to 87 acres of land and a major portion of the remaining land had been allotted to builders. The high court said the public purpose — development of residential and residential-commercial sectors in Gurugram — could not be met with acquisition of 87 acres and hence the final notification did not conform to the public purpose as stated in June 2009.
The landowners alleged their land had been acquired by the government so as to give undue favours to private builders. The high court had said: "The petitioners appear to be right in contending that since they did not come under the pressure tactics of the land mafia prowling in the area, their land have been usurped (through acquisition) out of vengeance."

The Haryana government had contended that 87 acres of land was acquired to construct schools, hospitals, community centres and other utility buildings, but the high court had said the builders were given land, it was their duty, and not that of the state government, to provide for these civic amenities.
The high court had read through the design of the state government in the sham acquisition process and had said: "State machinery has bent over backwards to favour private colonisers (sic)...the collector, for reasons best known to him, completely abdicated his duty and sent a report to favour the cause of private builders. The petitioners' land is being expropriated only because they refused to come to the terms unilaterally dictated to them by the state-sponsored developers."