The Incredible Banker Page 26

  'I didn't understand, Mr Thakurta,' said Ronald.

  'During the search we found interesting facts about Savitha. She has a history. She is a part of a very carefully planned racket where she had been planted into your organisation with a long-term strategy. A marriage photograph, which we found hanging in her bedroom, shows that Savitha is none other than the wife of Ganjali, the Naxal leader who was the first Naxal to engage in a jihadi-style suicide bombing in Malkangiri in Orissa way back in 2004.I have been handling the Naxal wing of CBI for over a decade now and that's how I remember Ganjali's photograph very clearly. I am surprised how your hiring checks didn't figure that out. What concerned me even more was that your organisation hired her after Ganjali's death.'

  'We also recovered a number of documents from her home which had the names and addresses of people who we were already trailing because we suspected them to be Naxal sympathisers. Incriminating literature which was distributed to like-minded people to turn them into sympathisers for their cause was found in abundance. You would be surprised to know that we even recovered three revolvers from her residence, which is good enough to keep her in custody as we go about gathering more evidence against her.'

  'Sir, I suspect that there could be multiple Symbiotic Technologies in your bank and hence it might be worthwhile to check all accounts where cash is being paid in. Transactions which these Naxals conducted on their card accounts were of a specific nature. Hence it will be easy to identify.'

  'Can you please check that and let us know if there are more of such accounts so that we can take action? You might want to block all these cards immediately.' It was Thakurta.

  'Sir,' added Karan, 'when she was in mortgages, the loans sourced by her and her team showed a significantly higher delinquency than the others. We initially thought it was due to credit-related and underwriting issues. However, now it seems prudent to revisit all the loans that she had sourced. Those were large ticket loans and you might have a significant amount at risk if they were obtained by fraudulent means. Investigating those may give Mr Thakurta some vital clues in the battle against the Naxals. It might give some insight into where the money is being routed to.'

  'I am sorry we may be sounding like telling you how to run the bank but that's not our intent. We are just cautioning you against all that has happened,' said Thakurta as he thanked Ronald and made his way out of the building. Karan and Andy also moved out.

  Ronald was left in the room wondering how he was going to handle one more blow up and how was he going to pacify the RBI. While this saga seemed to have ended, it was just the beginning of yet another uphill climb for him.

  The Journey Ends

  SAVITHA, after being taken into custody from McCain's office, was headed straight to CBI office where she was charged under the draconian PSA act. Her fate was sealed the moment her name was displayed on Karan's phone when he had keyed in the number from Jinesh Shah's video clipping. Both she and her husband were ardent Naxal sympathisers who had come to Mumbai from Malkangiri. Ganjali, with whom she was married off by the village elders, had given up his life for the Naxal cause, and that was when Savitha had vowed to keep the flag flying high. She took on the cause of providing infrastructural support for the Naxal cause by infiltrating a bank and helping the Naxals raise and transfer money from their supporters to the Naxals' fund. Symbiotic Technologies was a brilliant plan hatched by Anakadundhubi and Savitha. Deepak was unwittingly sucked into the plan.

  She faced the prospect of being in jail long enough to forget what a career at GB2 would feel like. Even if, at some stage, the antiquated law of the country let her free, she was unlikely to ever find a job in another bank. She was not in love with Deepak and what happened to him obviously didn't matter to her. Her daughter was condemned to lead a life in an orphanage in Panvel, on the outskirts of Mumbai.

  Deepak Sarup, after spending three months in jail, was released on bail as the CBI didn't have enough evidence to name him in their chargesheet. Savitha's arrest took the attention off Deepak Sarup, which made life easier for him. After Savitha was taken into custody, Karan's newspaper ran a series of articles on how Savitha could have beaten the system and how she set up Deepak by pushing him into a friendship with the referee. Karan's crusade to prove Deepak's innocence paid off. Even though the court cases were still on, Deepak was a free and relieved man now.

  However, he was facing challenges of a different kind. Going back to GB2, an organisation where he was accused of frauds, was always going to be awkward. Taking moral responsibility for the large-scale frauds which happened in his regime, he quit GB2. However, he was struggling to find another job. The financial services was a small sector in India and almost everyone knew about Deepak's reputation. Stories of the politics he indulged in with Karan, including the infamous SMS episode, had become folklore in the industry. Fearing that he would vitiate the atmosphere, no one really wanted to hire him. Karan helped him out by giving him some odd jobs at the TV channel but that was proving to be difficult and unsustainable. Last heard, he had joined a small-time credit bureau as its project manager. A big comedown from where he was in GB2! But isn't life a big leveller?

  Karan came out the strongest from the entire episode. His stock rose to dizzying heights within the Times group. He was the banking editor for their TV channel ET Now. He was also offered a plum position in the editorial board of The Times of India. The pain of leaving GB2 and even Citibank was soon forgotten and he was heralded as the upcoming star of the media industry. Kavya's reentry into his life was permanent. The two of them met that Friday, the day Savitha was arrested. What (re) started with Kavya saying 'we will see na' ended with them seeing each other permanently. They eventually got married and settled down in their own apartment in Pali Hill in Bandra.

  Francis, the referee, or was he Anakadundhubi or Kishore? No one knew. His real name, his real identity, was something which remained a mystery till the very end. All that was known about him was that he was a commander in the Maoist camp. A typical example of a village boy picked up at a tender age, brainwashed and called upon to serve the cause of the Maoist rebels. Joining hands with Savitha, he had brilliantly manipulated Deepak into unknowingly working for their cause. Though the fraud was detected and the manipulations curtailed in GB2, how many such Anakadundubhis were lurking around in the country was anybody's guess!

  Ronald McCain wrote back to the RBI after the dust settled on this issue. The RBI took a very strong view of the issues that GB2 had had in the past and took the extreme step of writing to the bank's board in UK, cautioning them against any recurrence of such issues. It said that it was treating the money-laundering episode as a failure on the part of the bank to control, detect and report illegal transactions and was not treating it as a war against the nation as its initial letter might have suggested. But it also said that any repeat of such laxity would call for suspension of banking license in the country.

  Ronald, after spending two challenging years at the helm in GB2, when last heard, was counting the days for his exit from India and to bring to an end this infamous saga that happened once upon a time in the Greater Boston Global Bank.