Senior citizen gets life for Rs 1 crore fraud, fined Rs 5 crore

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A special court on Tuesday sentenced a 67-year-old man to life imprisonment for fraudulently withdrawing Rs 1.04 crore from a bank by forging signatures of a Dubai-based NRI from 1996 to 1999.

The court also imposed a cumulative fine of Rs 5.03 crore on Narendra Patel. CBI court judge S R Tamboli convicted Patel under sections 467 (Forgery of valuable security), 420 (cheating and dishonestly inducing delivery of property) and other relevant sections of the Indian Penal Code (IPC). According to the prosecution, Hussain Nensey, a resident of UAE, had, in 1996, opened a term deposit of Rs 1 crore for three years at the SBI's Hughes Road branch in south Mumbai. The fraud was detected in 1999 when Nensey visited the branch for a business loan against his deposit, it said.

During scrutiny, it was found that Rs 1 crore was withdrawn from Nensey's account using his forged signatures, and also an account was opened in his name using fake documents. A case was then registered with the CBI.

The investigators nailed the role of Patel who had connived with two officials of the SBI and a private person in the fraud, the prosecution said. It was Patel who forged the signatures of Nensey and the latter's wife on bank documents, and illegally withdrew the money from the account thereby causing a loss of Rs 1.04 crore (approx) to SBI, the court was told. The three accused, including the two officials of SBI and another person, were sentenced to jail for three years in 2015. Patel, who was on the run, was arrested in 2016.

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