Court dismisses Citibank scam co-accused’s bail plea

GURGAON: For the second time, a Gurgaon city court dismissed the bail application of Citibank scam co-accused Sanjay Gupta, the suspended associate vice president of Hero Corporate Services, on Saturday.

The hearing on the bail plea began at 11am in the packed courtroom of additional sessions judge Vimal Kumar. After hearing argumets of both sides for over 40 minutes, the judge said he would announce the order after lunch. Though Gupta was not produced in person, his family waited for the order with bated breath.

This is the first time that a court has taken a cue from the recent Supreme Court order where the apex court rejected the bail application of B Ramalinga Raju, the main accused in the Satyam fraud case. The court observed that like in the Satyam case, the multi-crore Citibank fraud also involved huge amounts of public money.

The court observed that it was amply clear that Gupta is involved in the case on the basis of confessional statement of main accused Shiv Raj Puri , the relationship manager at Citibank.

The judge said that since the police is still investigating the case and is yet to file a chargesheet in the matter, it was important that the accused is not granted bail.

Though Gupta was not named in the initial FIR lodged by the city police last year, the investigating officers arrested Gupta in January this year based on confessional statements of the prime accused.

Sanjay Gupta had filed his first bail application but later withdrew it from the court of ASJ Subhash Goyal on February 25 on “technical grounds” .

The court dismissed Gupta’s plea that he had been falsely implicated in the case since the bank observed that being a chartered accountant, he was managing the finances of the Hero group which had invested Rs 250 crore in the false schemes floated by Puri. The court also observed that Gupta had received a sum of Rs 20 crore as commission which he invested in a partnership firm, movable and immovable assets.

“Scams do not happen overnight, they are well planned,” argued the Citibank advocate Harish Malhotra . The court also held that Gupta is involved in the corporate scam after studying all the furnished facts.