A British Indian business man, Virendra Rastogi was found guilty of defrauding some 20 banks across the Atlantic of more than 350 million pounds, one of the biggest frauds in recent banking history.
After a seven years investigation and trial, Rastogi and his associates were convicted for running an ‘incestuous empire’ of fictitious firms.
The Southwark Crown Court convicted Rastogi for nine and half year jail sentence and his associates Anand Jain and Gautam Majumdar for eight and half and seven and half years respectively. The judge called their actions a ‘crime of the utmost gravity’ which had caused ‘enormous damage’ to banks.
Rastogi, 39 years old, lived ostentatiously and hailed as one of the biggest success stories of British Indian enterprise and even featured in ‘The Sunday Times’ famous rich list as among the country’s wealthiest Asian businessmen.
But Rastogi’s business life ended humiliatingly, when his business empire comprised of more than 300 fictitious companies, whose high valued clients were also fake.
To cite a few examples of his valued clients whose address were fake:-
1)One client’s supposed address in Muradabad,UP, turned out to be a cowshed,
2)Another high valued client of New Jersey, US, was actually of a scraps books shop run by an old woman,
Rastogi and his associates ran their bogus operation from a fashionable address in Piccadilly, Central London, through a metal trading company RBG resources.They even got two peers, Labour’s Lord Cunningham and Liberal Democrats’ Lord Holmes, to become the advisers to the company and to give it respectability.
The fraud , which involved borrowing money from banks onn the strength of fake business documents was detected accidentally by the mistake of an employee who faxed some forged documents to a wrong address.The recipient turned out to be the company’s auditors who became suspicious and raised the alarm, triggering a trans-Atlantic criminal investigation.
It is an irony that a rank fraud could run a business empire and even became a millionaire, entirely based on a house of cards, that too in an advanced western country whose Scotland yard police is world famous for its investigating ability.