The Incredible Banker Page 21

  Karan looked through the entire statement for the year. Every transaction made was succeeded by a corresponding payment well before the due date. There was not a single statement in the last one year when he had to pay anything at the statement date. Moreover, every month there were two or at best three large value transactions. He turned towards Bhaskar.

  'Bhaskar, every single spend is succeeded by a payment within the next four days. Not a single instance of a delay beyond four days. Throughout the year there have been eight transactions. Apart from the one in July, all others are small in value.'

  'Hmm...not the mark of a man who needs money to run his Naxal movement! Clearly he is not paying the money himself? Bhaskar said.

  "Then what could it be?'

  'I don't know. You are supposed to be the banking expert.' Bhaskar winked at him. 'Anyway, I am leaving for the day. Will talk to you tomorrow.'

  'Goodnight, Bhaskar.'

  Suddenly Bhaskar stopped and looked back at Karan as if he had forgotten to mention something. 'Friend, Andy liked your piece for tomorrow. I have written another update on the basis of the CBI press release. We are carrying your article and mine on the front page, with a small tagline which says – You read it first on The Times of India. You have arrived, my friend. Well done!'

  "Thanks, Bhaskar. I look forward to your guidance.'

  'Ok, thanks. By the way if I take a credit card, which one do you recommend?' Bhaskar asked.

  'GB2 has a good proposition. You must look at it.'

  'Ok...and you said I won't be caught if I spend less than two lakh per annum, or if I pay less than 50,000 in cash whenever I make a payment. At least I won't have to quote my PAN number anywhere, for any transaction. Right?'

  'Yes, Bhaskar.'

  'Ok, thanks. Take care. Goodnight.'

  And Bhaskar left for the day leaving Karan holding all his papers, wondering what to do with them. The discussion with Bhaskar rang in his mind. He thought through it again and again. There was some meaning in what Bhaskar had said. Karan was sure that he knew a lot more than what he projected. It was very unlikely that he did not know about credit cards, leave alone the basics that Karan mentioned to him.

  Two things kept harassing him during the entire discussion with Bhaskar and even after that. The first one was on Francis paying the spent amount almost as soon as the expense was incurred on the card, especially in view of the fact that the Naxals were always short on cash. And secondly, why were all transactions in the 38-45 K range? There was something in Bhaskar's smile, which told him that he knew it all. What was it? The sparkle in Bhaskar's eyes, as Karan was explaining the transactions in the card statement to him, was not normal.

  What could it be? He was so close to nailing it, yet so far from it. Why was that moment of brilliance eluding him?

  His concentration was shattered by the beep on his mobile. Someone had sent him a message. He glanced at his phone kept on the table next to him. The screen of his iPhone displayed 'text message – Bhaskar'. Next to it were two buttons. One displayed 'close' and the other displayed 'view'. He touched the 'view' button. Bhaskar's message opened on his screen.

  Still thinking? If you really want to be an investigative journalist, you need to think fast. If you cant get to the bottom of this by tomorrow, let me know. I will tell you where you went wrong. Cheers, goodnight.

  What the hell was this? He was right. Bhaskar knew what the issue was. That guy was too smart. Here Karan was struggling to decipher the head or tail of these documents and Bhaskar had within minutes figured out what the problem was. He was slightly embarrassed that Bhaskar had upstaged him in solving the mystery of the transactions. But he was now more determined to succeed. He had to get to the bottom – he was not going home till he cracked the puzzle.

  After another twenty minutes with those papers, Karan gave up. He tried calling Bhaskar but he didn't pick up his phone. Giving himself one last chance, Karan went to the coffee machine. He picked up a cup of coffee and headed back to his desk. His body wanted him to give up but his pride didn't let him.

  He picked up the transaction list again. He looked at the spent amount again and then at the payments made. There was a 100 per cent correlation. Why would that be? Why would anyone spend on a card and make a payment within the next three days ? If he had cash to pay, then why even incur the expense on the card? He might as well have paid in cash and bought the goods. Merchants normally give discounts on cash purchase over and above what they offer when someone buys things on a card.

  One transaction in particular perplexed him. On 18 August, there was a purchase transaction in Raipur for 48,000. The payment corresponding to this purchase was made on 21 August. And there was another purchase made in Jamshedpur for 45,600 on 21 August. What was surprising was that, as per the transaction list, the cash payment into the account was made in the Kolkata branch. The money had been deposited in Kolkata whereas the customer was in Raipur and Jamshedpur on those two days. 'Wait! Something is not right here,' he said to himself and looked back at the transactions.

  Was Francis in Raipur? Or was he in Kolkata? Was he in Jamshedpur ? There was something fishy there. Was this the moment of brilliance that was eluding him? The customer was based in Mumbai. Francis's office and residence according to the application form were in Mumbai. There were transactions in Raipur and Jamshedpur and payments made in Kolkata. Didn't seem normal!

  He then went and looked back at all his transactions in the past six months. Particularly the payments into the card account. And there it was! Staring at him right in the face. He had found the problem. He knew what had happened. The documents were so clear. He had cracked it. It could not have been anything else. When he would come out with these findings in the papers, he would be the king.

  He called Bhaskar. When Bhaskar didn't pick up the call, he decided to send him a SMS.

  'Bhaskar, I think I have cracked the problem. I will talk to you tomorrow morning. I am amazed at how you could figure this out before me. Hats off to you! I am proud to be working with you. Thanks. Goodnight.'

  Within the next 15 seconds he received a message on his phone which just said,' , we will talk tomorrow. Well done. Goodnight.'

  As Karan shut down his desktop and picked up his jacket from the chair to leave, he took one last look at the credit card transactions of Francis. Staring at it the last time, he tried to just make sure that he was not missing out something. He had looked at that paper so many times that day that he could now ratde off all the numbers in the sheet without even looking at it. He put it down and walked out of the room. He reached the lift lobby, still lost in thought about Francis and his exploits. He pressed the button to call the lift. It was in the second basement and he was on the sixth floor. The lift took some time in coming up. His mind space was completely overwhelmed by the transactions.

  Was there was more to it than what he and Bhaskar had figured out? And then it hit him hard. He started sweating. The wall next to the lift supported him when he felt dizzy and almost fell down. Thankfully there was a bottle of water in the lift lobby with a dispenser. He grabbed a glass of water and gulped it down.

  'Oh my God!' he said to himself. "This is not what we thought it to be. It could be worse.' He started to get scared. It could be big enough to knock him and Bhaskar out. He had to get help. He urgently dialled Bhaskar. He wasn't picking up. Karan composed himself and walked into the lift, which the liftman had held for him. At that hour, it was unlikely that anybody else would want the lift.

  Karan got into his car and drove out of the Times building and drove towards the suburbs. As his car sped on the JJ Flyover, he decided to take the next course of action only after consulting Bhaskar and Andy. It was too big for him to take a call on his own.

  Tuesday, 15 December 2009

  GB2 Offices, Mumbai

  RONALD McCain was a harassed man. If it was only The Times of India on Monday, the newspapers on Tuesday were splashed with stories about Deepak and GB2. Stories
about how the banks had relaxed their stringent hiring criteria and about how easy it was for anti-social elements to get into banks dominated the media space. Times carried an article about the CBI findings and the information shared in the CBI press conference. Alongside that article on the front page, was an article. "The Deepak Sarup that I know'. It was an article by Karan Panjabi.

  The article focused on human fallibility. It spoke about Deepak's aggressiveness and his uncontrolled desire to win and how the same could have led him astray. It spoke about how he enjoyed organisational support in almost everything he did. In the end the article left the readers with a question, and an interesting one at that. Was Deepak Sarup a Naxal sympathiser before he joined the bank, or did the Naxals find him an easy target given his attitude, ambition and organisational credibility, and brain-washed him into subscribing to their ideology? As of now the law enforcers are working on the former hypothesis, but it might be worth exploring the latter, too,' Karan had written.

  'Sherlyn,' screamed Ronald McCain from his office. He never believed in using the intercom. When she heard him scream, Sherlyn came running in. 'Ask Rohan, Inder, Saurabh, Bhisham and the entire investigating team to see me right now. If they are not in the office, get them on a call'. Ronald had just got off a video conference with the Group Public Affairs in New York and they wanted to be sure that GB2 was on the right side and there was no wrongdoing or laxity on its part. They had to be updated in the next thirty minutes as the Group CEO in New York was about to address a press conference.

  All of them assembled in his room within the next five minutes. At Bhisham's behest, Savitha joined in through video conference from her office in Malad. As Bhisham was not confident to handle Ronald all by himself, he requested Savitha to join in. She was the lone person on a VC while all the others were in Ronald's cabin.

  'So what have we got here?' Ronald was not in a good mood when he kicked off the meeting. No one spoke. Everyone kept looking at each other, waiting for the other person to start. No one wanted to say anything stupid and be drawn into this debate. When no one spoke, Savitha started. She was in a peculiar situation. Everyone was staring into the video screen in order to avoid Ronald McCain's stare and thus she felt that everyone was looking at her and expected her to speak. However, she was ready with her story.

  'Ronald, we have reviewed all the documents pertaining to the credit card of Francis D'Silva and have noticed some anomalies. Firstly, the passport copy given to us was fake. Our forensic team had visited the residence address given in the application form and on the passport and found that even though such an address existed, the Francis D'Silva who lived there passed away three years ago. And the photo on the passport copy is not his. The copy of the fraudulent passport has been made so brilliantly that it passed the fraud check that we do during the course of our approval process. While the card seems to have been acquired on a fake passport, all the other documents are fine as they have been certified by the corporate where Francis worked. The fraud seems to have escaped early detection since the performance on his card was impeccable. Not a single delayed or missed payment in the last twelve months and every time the customer has paid up 100 per cent of his outstanding. This makes us believe that there was no intention on the customer's side to defraud the bank. Possibly the sales guys, in their zeal to get the customer a card, helped him with a fake passport,' Savitha said. It was very normal in any bank for the credit teams to pass on the blame to the sales guys in case of a mess up. Savitha was doing nothing different.

  'Are you saying, Savitha, that there is no way that we could have detected this fraud? I am sure there would have been warning signs. Our mails or credit card statements sent to this address would have returned. Wouldn't that have been a trigger?' Ronald asked impatiently.

  'Yes, Ronald. That would surely have been a trigger. In this case, however, the card got delivered to the customer's office and all his statements are mailed to an email address. As a part of our green initiatives we are getting most of the new customers sign up for email statements.'

  'Hmm...how are the other cards from the corporate performing?'

  'We checked that as well, Ronald. In fact we track the performance on these cards every month. At the time of approving the deal we had mandated a monthly tracking of the portfolio and had even set up benchmarks. As per that approval condition, the performance of cards from this corporate is tracked and reported every month. I am happy to state that all the cards are performing brilliantly In fact they are performing in line with the best portfolios. It's a high spend and low default group of customers for us. Ideal, Ronald. Its an ideal portfolio. One thing important to be mentioned here is that the corporate has shut down. They have gone out of business in India and have exited the country. We sent someone to the corporate to check on this yesterday. This is the feedback we have received. Unfortunately we do not have any corporate bank relationship with Symbiotic Technologies, else we would have known earlier.'

  "Ihen why don't we withdraw the damn cards from all their employees? How many of them are there who still have our credit cards ?' Ronald was getting worried.

  'Ronald, it's about 900 of them. I do not think we can withdraw the cards facility because of two reasons. Firstly, there is no performance deterioration. They are performing well. And secondly, the cards were issued as personal cards and not as the corporate ones. As long as the customers keep paying us back, we will be drawn into trouble if we withdraw the credit card facility to them, especially now that this issue has come in public domain, withdrawing the cards immediately may not be looked at kindly.'

  'Hmm...ok. Let's deal with Francis first. We will then figure a way of dealing with the others,' Ronald said.

  A knock on the door disturbed them. She had been trying to reach him on the intercom, but he was so engrossed in the call that he didn't notice.

  'Yes, Sherlyn?'

  'I have a call on hold for you. Line 2.'

  'Who is it?' Ronald didn't want to break the discussion with Savitha and the rest.

  'Karan Panjabi from The Times of India'.

  'Please put him on to Mansi. She is handling the press.'

  'He says it is urgent. He needs to speak with you.'

  'Tell that fucker that I will talk to any one but him. At least for the five years that he worked in this organisation, he should have had the courtesy of calling us before putting that damn story out on Monday morning. I have no intention of talking to him. Tell him that. He can do what he wants to do.' Ronald was indignant.

  'Yes, boss.' Sherlyn went out of the room.

  'Karan, I am sorry. Boss doesn't want to speak with you. He is still upset with your Monday article,' Sherlyn informed him.

  "That was my job, Sherlyn. You know that. Why can't you explain this to him? Tell him that I want to tell him something which might be of interest to him.'

  'I tried, Karan.'

  'Please try one more time. Go and tell him that he will regret it if he doesn't speak with me,' Karan persisted.

  'Shut up, Karan. You want me to threaten my boss ?'

  'No, sweetie. I am not asking you to do that. But please...it is very important that I speak with him.'

  'Can you wait for thirty minutes? Let him finish what he is doing and I will speak to him after that. He will be alone and also would have cooled down. .

  'You said that he will be alone after this call. He has no other meetings lined up.'

  'Not as of now...definitely not till twelve. The next meeting after this is a call with Singapore at noon.'

  'If I get there now, will you get me an audience with him?' Karan asked.

  I will try.'

  "Thanks. I am coming there.'

  In the next twenty minutes a puffing and panting Karan had reached the fifth floor office of GB2. Sherlyn gave him a warm hug as she took him into a conference room on the side. Karan was still a popular guy at GB2. When he was working for the bank, he was a soft-spoken guy who would never rub anyone the wrong wa
y, until provoked to the extreme.

  'What is all this crap, Karan?' she asked him.

  'There's more to what meets the eye, Sherlyn. That's why I want to meet him. Did you tell him that I would be here?

  'No, I did not because had I told him, he would have refused to see you. At least now, I can tell him that you are here and ask him for an audience. Now you wait here. I will be back in a jiffy.' Sherlyn left for her boss' room.

  Within three minutes she was back. 'He says he doesn't want to see you. The organisation is very fussy about what word gets out and he doesn't want to quote anything to you beyond the brief that is to be put in the press note this evening.'

  'What nonsense! Tell him that if he doesn't see me, he will be up shit creek. People are taking him for a ride and he doesn't realise that. Tell him that I am here because I still have my loyalties towards this organisation. I quit this place not because I wanted to, but because I was frustrated with the politics here. The same politics will take this bank down. It is in his own benefit that he listens to me. There is a racket out here, which he needs to control and fix.'

  'Thank you, Mr Panjabi.' The thundering voice made them turn around. It was Ronald. 'I appreciate your concern. However, I would like to place on record that we have a competent team investigating this issue and would not like to engage with the press in an informal manner. Let it not be lost that you covered a very important piece without informing us. What makes you believe that we will have the same trust in you?'

  'Ronald,' began Karan, 'I can only tell you what I have learnt. It will help you. We will in no manner alter our coverage or investigation to suit you. If you are interested in listening to me to protect your bank, you allow me to speak. Otherwise, I am wasting my time.'

  "Thanks for coming here personally.' Ronald turned his back towards them, and held the conference room door open. Sherlyn was standing there, looking at the two of them, wondering whether to stay or leave.