Sunday, September 4 2005 17:24 Hrs (IST) - World Time -

New Delhi: The CBI yesterday (Sept 3, 2005) conducted raids against some officials of the State Bank of India (SBI) who were allegedly replacing bundles of soiled currency notes meant for destruction with brown papers of the same size.

The raids were conducted at the residential premises of SBI officials in Dhanbad, Singhbhum, Balia in Bihar and Mainpuri in Uttar Pradesh, a CBI spokesman said here.

These officials had allegedly misappropriated Rs 1.25 crore by replacing currency notes with brown papers of the same size in the bundles of soiled currency notes of different denominations meant for destruction by the Reserve Bank of India (RBI), he said.

The searches followed after CBI registered a case against the accused persons who had allegedly adopted the modus operandi of inserting brown papers and other papers cut into the same size as currency notes of different denominations to conceal their fraudulent act.

They had no inkling that their act would be detected since they had thought that RBI would destroy the notes as soon as it received them, the spokesman said.

However, they run short of luck when RBI's Patna branch detected the irregularities and returned the bundles for segregating them properly.

Subsequent scrutiny of the notes under the supervision of senior SBI officials revealed the fraud, he said, adding, the amount of loss may go up as the process of segregation of lower denomination notes was still continuing.

During the search of the bank officials, which include two officials who were joint custodians of the currency chest, the agency claimed to have recovered several incriminating documents that were being scrutinised.