The Income Tax raid on Buldana Urban has shaken the entire credit co-op sector in the country. CBDT says it has frozen deposits worth over Rs 53 crore after it found “glaring irregularities” in the opening of accounts.
On condition of anonymity, one of the top leaders of Buldana Urban said that the raid is politically motivated as most of the accounts in question belong to the Congress leader and former Maharashtra Chief Minister Ashok Chavan.
“We give loans to people doing business without considering their political affiliations but have to bear the brunt of political warfare”, he added saying members of all parties, BJP, Shiv Sena, NCP, and Congress have taken loans from us.
The co-operator also admitted “there were discrepancies no doubt in some accounts and Buldana Urban had already initiated a process to rectify the same. We identified such an account and wrote the account holders to fulfill KYC criteria, what else can we do”, he asked.
“Besides, being a credit co-op having a large number of networks we have no way to keep tabs on what is going on in a particular branch. We need to have a mechanism to keep a check”, he confessed.
It bears recall that more than 1,200 new bank accounts were opened in the said branch without PAN. The investigations, it said, found that these bank accounts were opened “without following the KYC (know your customer) norms and all account opening forms are filled in by the bank staff and they have put their signatures/thumb impressions, reports PTI.
The department alleged that multiple cash deposits of “exact” denominations of Rs 1.9 lakh each were made and they totaled Rs 53.72 crore.
“Out of these, more than 700 bank accounts have been identified which were opened in a series where cash deposits of more than Rs 34.1 crore were made immediately within seven days of the opening of the bank accounts, mainly during the period August 2020-May 2021,” it said.
A co-operator connected to the Buldana Urban said that before 2017 the norms of KYC were not strictly followed and most of these accounts belonged to that era. We started the process of fulfilling the KYC norms diligently once the rule came into operation.