Abetting fraud: Bail pleas of thirteen bankers dismissed

They are accused of allowing false Rs71m withdrawals.

LAHORE: Judge Chaudhry Hamayun Imtiaz of Special Court-1 (offences pertaining to banks) dismissed on Thursday the bail petitions of 13 employees of Allied Bank Limited who are accused of cashing 84 bank cheques amounting Rs71,029,419 and abetting the main suspect in an embezzlement case.

The prosecution said that Muhammad Aslam Shehzad, an accountant at Zoraiz Engineers Private Limited, and Muhammad Shafique, a cashier at the company, had embezzled more than Rs121,440,402 from the company. They are the main suspects in the case.

The prosecution said Rs71 million had been cashed against 84 bank cheques from the Allied Bank Limited, Bridge Colony Branch, Lahore Cantt. The cheques had been cashed in connivance with the bank staff. Vouchers of Rs50,041,983, that Shehzad and Shafique were supposed to deposit at the bank never made it to the bank. However, they were marked in the company’s records as deposited.

The prosecution said that more than 175 cheques, from the company, that had been cashed at the Allied Bank Limited, Bridge Colony branch, were sent to the Forensic Science Laboratory in Islamabad. The report revealed that 84 cheques carried forged signatures that did not match the signature of the account holder. The rest of the cheques had carried the account holder’s signature.

Bank employees Mubashara Chaudhry, Muhammad Usman, Anam Islam, Muhammad Rehan Iqbal, Naeem Qadri, Farhan Ahmad Zaidi, Waseem Shahid, Muhammad Ashraf, Uzma Afzal, Muhammad Qasim, Taimoor Hassan, Shahid Hussain and Shahid Baleegh-ur-Rehman had filed bail petitions saying they had nothing to do with the matter and had been implicated with the intent to blackmail and humiliate them.

Counsel for the suspects said that the FIR against them was false, frivolous and fabricated. He said that they had not been nominated in the FIR nor were they criminals.

Advocates Muhammad Asif Chattha and Muhammad Naeem Malik, counsel for complainant Major (r) Hussain Ansari, said that the suspects were responsible for approving 84 cheques in connivance with the main suspects. They said, however, that their offence could be declared lesser.

In his order, the judge said the petitioners, as bankers, were hand in glove with each other at the behest of Shehzad and Shafique. It is amazing how they had turned a blind eye when approving massive transactions involving fake cheques. The order notes that the petitioners had not made CBCs (Call Back Confirmations) to inform the account holder of the transactions amounting to more than Rs200,000 at a time. The order says the transactions had occurred over a long period in the case of one person. That cannot be considered mere negligence, the order says.

The pre-arrest bail sought by Shehzad was earlier dismissed by the court. The order says that the law of consistency requires that the same treatment be extended to the bankers. The pre-arrest bail filed by the petitioners appears meritless, the order notes.

Published in The Express Tribune, March 4^th, 2016.