PNB scam case: Former V-P of Mehul Choksi’s Gitanjali Group gets bail
India Today
Vipul Chitalia, former vice-president of Mehul Choksi-promoted Gitanjali Group, was granted bail by the Bombay High Court in the PNB scam case.
The Bombay High Court on Thursday granted bail to Vipul Chitalia, former vice-president of Mehul Choksi-promoted Gitanjali Group and an accused in the multi-crore Punjab National Bank (PNB) scam.
Chitalia was alleged to have left India but returned, but was arrested by the Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) in March 2018. He has been in jail for the last four years, except when he was granted temporary bail in 2018 to attend his daughter’s wedding.
Arguing Chitalia’s bail plea, advocates Vijay Aggarwal and Rahul Agarwal cited his prolonged custody period. They pointed to the delay in trial and said that the agency had still not completed its investigation and charges were yet to be framed in the case.
Special Public Prosecutor Hiten Venegavkar opposed the bail plea on the merits of the case by pointing to the role played by Chaitalia in the commission of the crime. Venegaonkar argued that Chitalia was the "mastermind" who put through fraudulent transactions along with Choksi and who knew about the fraud since the very beginning.
Moreover, he was one of the two authorised signatories of the group for the issuance of applications for Letters of Undertaking (LoU) from the banks, the agency said. An LoU is a bank guarantee under which a bank can allow its customer to raise money from another, typically overseas bank.
However, Aggarwal pointed to the ground of parity where he stated that Chitalia's co-accused, who signed the LOUs with him, was granted bail soon after the first chargesheet was filed in the case.
According to the CBI chargesheet, Gokulnath Shetty, the then deputy manager of PNB's Brady House branch, who is one of the prime accused in the case, received a bribe of Rs 1.02 crore from Choksi's companies to clear 58 fake foreign letters of credit (FLCs) and 142 fake letters of undertaking (LOUs).
