A CBI team that was probing malpractices by senior executives of the Metals and Minerals Trading Corporation (MMTC) in Chennai recently stumbled upon 400 kg of unaccounted gold worth Rs125 crore in the safety lockers of a private firm dealing in bullion on NSC Bose Road.
“We believe that 75 per cent of the gold that we seized from that firm was unaccounted for. This firm and another bullion dealer together, with the help of two senior executives, had swindled nearly Rs28 crore,” sources in the CBI said on Tuesday.
All the gold seized from the bullion dealer has been handed over to court for safekeeping, officials noted.
A present senior executive of the MMTC, Chennai, had approached the CBI nearly a month ago seeking an investigation into the suspected fraud in the government run corporation between 2007 and 2011.
The CBI found that two persons Gurusamy and Gurmurthy, former senior officers at the MMTC, had manipulated the accounts at the MMTC in bullion trading during the period to help at least two firms in Chennai.
“We believe that one firm benefited by as much as Rs18 crore through the account manipulation while the other firm managed to get an advantage of more than Rs10 crore. Though the MMTC has nationwide software to make sure that nobody in the corporation manipulates accounts to help clients, the Chennai officials were manually recording the account, claiming that the software was corrupted in Chennai,” said an official.
The two officials retired a year ago and were given plum postings by the private companies that benefited. The CBI official maintained that the probe was not yet over. “We are trying to find out if there were any other beneficiaries,” an official said.