LIC – Life Insurance Corporation or Losing Investors Confidence. Perhaps the latter could be a better name for Life Insurance Corporation of India.
This time a scam has been surfaced from the state capital of Uttar Pradesh, Lucknow where investors have lost a lot of hard-earned money.
The estimate of the loss to the exchequer is Rs. 10 crore so far but this could be just the tip of the iceberg. The worst part is that the LIC is still trying to keep the scam under wraps and protect the scamster and others involved.
The matter has been reported from Lucknow where about six months back, the accused, one Pankaj Saxena, a Higher-Grade Assistant in the trans-Gomti Branch of Lucknow was caught after he had siphoned off at least Rs. 10 crore from the branch.
After repeated attempts, Head of Corporate Communications of Life Insurance Corporation, Mr Vipin Anand, confirmed the incident saying that a case has been registered in the incident by the Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI).
He said that he did not have the details as to under what all sections of the Indian Penal Code the case has been registered by the CBI and whether the accused has been arrested or not.
The LIC top management has not been able to answer wha has been done till date to recover the public money from the accused.The only formality LIC did was to place the accused under suspension and an internal enquiry was ordered to probe the matter.
Pankaj Saxena is accused of siphoning money from surrender payments, loan payments, maturity payments etc. His modus-operandi was quite simple. He used to prepare vouchers, checked them, passed them, made cheques of the payments and validate the vouchers as he was one of the signatories. The same had to be counter signed by another person from senior person. Every day 300 to 400 cheques of payment are made in this particular branch.
The accused is said to have made at least four bank accounts in fictitious names where he deposited the cheques he made in such names and later withdrew the money. It was during a routine checking when officials stumbled upon this scam or else it would have went on for more time.
All efforts to contact LIC officials for their comments proved futile. Senior Divisional Manager (Lucknow) Mr. Azizuddin did not reply to www.psuindia.in calls. Zonal Manager (Kanpur) Mr. M. Kumar when contacted said that he has recently joined in Kanpur and hence does not have any knowledge about this case.
It seems to be a clear case where LIC is trying to hush up the matter by not respoding to further queries of www.psuindia.in.
Source : www.psuindia.in
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