New Delhi: The Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) has booked a senior manager of the Airports Authority of India (AAI) for allegedly embezzling funds of the Dehradun airport to the tune of Rs 232 crore.
Rahul Vijay, the accused, headed the finance and accounts vertical at AAI’s Dehradun airport from 2019 to 2023. Currently, he is posted at the Jaipur airport in the same capacity.
An FIR was filed Tuesday based on a complaint by another AAI senior manager (finance) at Dehradun airport, alleging misuse of position as an authorised signatory to the AAI bank account and transferring an amount to his personal account disguised as funds utilised for asset creation.
In the complaint, the AAI senior manager alleged that upon observing some abnormal recordings of assets on the balance sheet during the period when Vijay was the authorised signatory, a committee was constituted to investigate the details of those assets.
“During verification, it was found that Rahul Vijay, SM (F&A), while posted at Dehradun airport, passed some fictitious entries and fraudulently transferred an amount of Rs 232 crore approx. (as detected till date) to his personal bank account during the period from February 2019 to August 2022,” the complaint reads.
In its findings, a committee found that the accused misused his position and had three user IDs created for the AAI’s bank account, which was maintained with the State Bank of India. After this, he began transferring money from AAI’s bank account to his own, initially with a smaller amount, allegedly to avoid detection.
Vijay orchestrated the majority of the embezzlement in September 2021 when he transferred Rs 189 crore into his account by inflating the figure a day after creating tangible assets worth Rs 67.81 crore in the form of the first phase of electrical work for the airport’s new terminal building, according to the AAI.
The next day, he allegedly created 17 additional fictitious assets of Rs 189 crore and got the money transferred into his personal account.
Of the Rs 232 crore allegedly siphoned off by Vijay, the AAI alleged that funds worth Rs 43 crore were disbursed under different revenue expenditure heads during his tenure at the Doon airport.
Based on the complaint and information of sanction from the competent authority, the CBI booked Vijay along with unknown public servants and private persons under Section 120B (criminal conspiracy), 409 (criminal breach of trust by public servants), 467 (forgery of valuable security), 468 (forgery for the purpose of cheating), 471 (using as genuine a forged document), 477 A (falsification of accounts) of the Indian Penal Code and relevant provisions of the Prevention of Corruption Act.
(Edited by Tony Rai)
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This is ridiculous. Is there no checks and balances