Citibank fraud: 'I believed what Puri said, he was very convincing’

Viresh (name changed) is one of the nearly two-dozen victims of the multi-crore fraud engineered by Shiv Raj Puri, the relationship manager of Citibank’s DLF-II branch. The investor who has been duped of almost Rs 20 crore recalls how the accused approached him about one-and-ahalf-years ago. They met at the bank.

He shared with me details of a lucrative scheme and showed me relevant documents which looked absolutely genuine. I saw no reason to doubt Puri and made an investment in good faith.

Most of us who have enough liquid cash want to benefit from lucrative investments. But we don’t really have time to spend on nitty-gritty . We want good investments but are loathe to invest time in making the careful choices. Puri exploited this to the hilt and duped several investors like me and also corporate clients.

The banker swindled investors in two ways. He used to approach big companies and corporates claiming he had been authorised to manage a custodian account in Citibank.

He showed us papers -- that have now emerged to be fakes -- to establish how he had been authorised by his bank and also by the market regulator Securities and Exchange Board of India (Sebi). The Sebi documents he showed us claimed that the branch had been authorised to float schemes which will fetch 18% interest on investments, particularly in the case of fixed deposits. When we picked a saving scheme, he got us to sign a number of blank papers.

He claimed he was investing my money in mutual funds of my choice but put the amount in different schemes using his own accounts. I now realise he kept dipping into my funds to make investments of his choice in the stock market.

He also sent online monthly bank statements in time to avoid any suspicion. But those were also forged. By the time the fraud came to light, we had lost our savings.

As told to Sanjay Yadav