By Quaid Najmi Mumbai 11th, September : In a brand new element of the Dewan Housing Finance Ltd.(DHFL) fraud an apex union of banks and the employees of UTI-AMC are demanding an “forensic audit” regarding their company’s claimed “Rs 2000 crore exposure” into the scam-hit gang of Dheeraj R.Wadhawan and Kapil R.Wadhawan.
The staffers’ organizations include Mumbai-based All India UTI AMC Officers Association (AIUTI-AMCOA) and the non-independent yet powerful Chennai-based All India Bank Officers Association (AIBOA).
The AIUTI AMCOA and AIBOA have issued separate letters to different entities while an influential leader has requested the direction of the central government to the Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI), Enforcement Directorate (ED) and Income Tax (IT) Department to investigate the issue thoroughly since the issue involved “huge public money”.
AIUTI-AMCOA Chairman Vishwas Utagi and General Secretary Pawan K.Abrol have written to the Joint Secretary of the Department of Investment & Public Asset Management (DIPAM), Ministry of Finance and the SEBI Chairman regarding the losses claimed to have been that the UTI Treasury Advantage Fund in the DHFL scandal.
In the basis of two letters (November 2019 and January 2020), Utagi and Abrol claimed that the UTI-AMC had given an unspecific response (November 25 2019,) to the effect that “UTI Mutual Fund (UTI MF) had taken a prudent risk of 3.5 per cent to 4 percent in the UTI-TAF Scheme in the year DHFL was AAA rating”.
Abrol said that this implied that there was no subsequent investments or transactions by UTI-AMC, especially after September 2018, when DSP Mutual Fund sold off their Wadhawan brothers’ DHFL securities.
However, former officials of UTI-MF, who had access to sensitive information – later disclosed that UTI-AMC had been investing in the DHFL Securities to bail out redemption of earlier securities, even though the scam was exposed and led to the detention of the Wadhawans Utagi.
“When all of the MF industry had left DHFL Securities, the UTI-AMC’s exposure had risen to an astonishing Rs 2,000-crore.The Director and CEO of UTI-AMC Imtiazur Rahman must internally probe to determine who authorized the illegal investments with or without his knowledge.
and then make the investigation public and turn the matter over to the CBI-ED to conduct further investigations,” Utagi demanded.
In a separate letter to T.K.Pandey Secretary of DIPAM in a separate letter, AIBOA General Secretary S.Nagarajan has called for a “forensic audit” into the UTI AMC’s investments in DHFL Securities.
“As we live in an age of transparency, and the Government at the Centre is committed to “zero tolerance” principle in all areas and we ask that you initiate the ‘forensic audit’ of investments made by UTI-AMC Ltd.” Nagarajan requested Pandey.
Utagi and Abrol pointed out that, since the DHFL scandal is being investigated by different probe agencies, “the AIUTI-AMCOA seeks a “forensic audit” of each investment transaction of UTI MF to confirm the legitimacy of the UTI-AMC’s assertions”.
The DHFL was founded in April 1984 by the late Rajesh Kumar Wadhawan and later headed by Kapil R.Wadhawan as the Chairman-cum-Managing Director and his brother Dheeraj R.Wadhawan as a Director.
Following the emergence of the frauds in 2019 the Reserve Bank of India (RBI) in November 2019 sacked the DHFL Board and later Kapil Wadhawan was detained by ED in the connection with the money-laundering and fake-loans frauds of more than 21,000 crores that involved numerous other banks, banks and financial institutions.
The trio of Nagarajan, Abrol and Utagi stated that the Centre and SEBI and the central investigation agencies, must “immediately take action” in the larger national interest, as public funds are in danger, and the truth has to be exposed.
(Quaid Najmi can be reached via [email protected])
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