Sir — This refers to the editorial, “A fraud for the ages” (February 16). Even as liquor baron Vijay Mallya exploits every trick to evade extradition from the UK, a potentially bigger scandal has come to light. Reports of fraudulent withdrawal of over Rs 11,300 crore by a high-profile jeweler, Nirav Modi, from the Punjab National Bank are so disturbing that these raise questions marks about the continued validity of the public ownership of not only PNB but all other banks.
The PNB-Nirav Modi fraud is just the tip of the iceberg. It will be fallacious to see it only as a malaise in the Indian banking system, which of course, still hasn’t learnt its lessons from the Harshad Mehta scam a quarter century ago. But today’s scamsters have learnt a lesson from Harshad Mehta — they flee the country before their crime gets uncovered.
Are our rulers so dumb that they cannot learn from the periodic raids on the banksIJ Scams take place under one political regime and scamsters flee the country under the other. Both the incumbent and the predecessor lack the political will to investigate these scams. Undoubtedly, the businessman-politician nexus is strong and omnipresent.
