BENGALURU: Two women and a man have been booked for allegedly creating fake documents to show a road as a residential site and mortgaging it to raise a loan of Rs 50 lakh from a cooperative bank.
VV Puram police have registered a complaint of cheating against Sridevi R, 35, a medical practitioner and resident of Denkanikottai, Tamil Nadu; Jayalalitha KN, 52, of JP Nagar; and Meghanatha BR, 60, of Chittoor, Andhra Pradesh. The complaint was filed by Harish Kumar M, branch manager of Sreenidhi Souharda Sahakari Bank Niyamita, VV Puram, on March 24.
Kumar said the suspects are members of the bank. Sridevi applied for a loan to purchase a site belonging to Jayalalitha. They submitted documents pertaining to the site in November 2019. Sridevi’s husband Dr Ravishankar Babu, a medical practitioner, stood surety for the loan. The bank sanctioned the loan after verifying the documents and disbursed Rs 50 lakh through a pay order.
After paying two EMIs, Sridevi stopped payments. The bank decided to recover the amount by selling the site in a public auction under the provisions of Securitisation and Reconstruction of Financial Assets and Enforcement of Security Interest Act and announced this through advertisements in newspapers on March 14. Officials also pasted a poster informing about the public auction on the compound wall of the property.
Seeing the posters, locals alerted officials of Bangalore Metropolitan Task Force (BMTF) that the site was actually a road. BMTF officials wrote to the bank informing this and the bank officials verified the same with the authorities concerned.
The miscreants had altered the sanctioned blueprint of the layout and shown the road as a site. They had got the plot registered with the help of fake documents. The property was first sold to an individual in 2006 and later Jayalalitha purchased it. BBMP had cancelled its khata in 2015. But Jayalalitha and other suspects hid these facts from the bank. Meghanatha was the middleman in the scheme.
Police have registered a case of cheating, forgery and criminal conspiracy against them.
