New Bank of Baroda chief says to appoint external agency to probe scams

Mumbai: Taking cognizance of two major crisis facing Bank of Baroda, its newly appointed managing director and chief executive P S Jayakumar on Tuesday said an external agency would be appointed to probe the wrong-doings.

He also said that his focus will be to change the system and train employees to stop re-occurrence of such incidents.

"We attach very high level of seriousness to the (corruption) issue. My goal is to work with the team and get the details," Jayakumar told reporters after taking over the charge here today.

On the money laundering scam, he said the bank will be appointing an external agency to investigate scam.

"We will be appointing an external agency to investigate scam and we will make a detail presentation to the audit committee within a week," he said, adding the bank will prepare future plan in 90 days.

"We have to make appropriate changes in our system and train people accordingly so that such things do not happen again," he added.

The former MD and CEO of VBHC Value Homes has taken over the charge of the second largest state-run bank at a time when the bank is facing two major crises-for allegedly channelling a whopping Rs 6,175 crore of black money from its Ashok Vihar branch in Delhi to Hong Kong and another of a Rs 350-crore bill discounting fraud detected at one of its Ahemdabad branches.

Jayakumar said in the next one week the bank will present a report on both the issues to the audit committee.

"We are planning to appoint an external accounting agency to strengthen our accounting practices," he said, adding he will also meet analysts in the next 90 days to share his strategy.

Meanwhile, the Enforcement Directorate has arrested four people, including an HDFC Bank official under money laundering charges in the Rs 6,175 crore suspicious remittances case at BoB branch in the national capital today.

Terming the issue as a case of trade-based money laundering, where accused traders evade custom duties and taxes to generate slush funds, the agency arrested Kamal Kalra, working with the foreign exchange division of HDFC Bank, Chandan Bhatia, Gurucharan Singh Dhawan and Sanjay Aggarwal after marathon questioning.

All the accused are alleged middlemen for at least 15 fake companies, out of the total 59 which were involved in the perpetrating of the economic crime unearthed recently and also being probed by the CBI.