Citi honoured him for work, Puri tells cops

GURGAON: Citibank may have been trying to put the entire blame on its disgraced relationship manager (RM) Shiv Raj Puri for the multi-crore scam, but investigators revealed that the accused was one of the most decorated RMs in the entire group. He had received a few awards at the national and international level from top bank officials before the scam was unearthed.
This was disclosed by Puri to the investigators, confirmed Gurgaon police commissioner S S Deswal.“He told us that he got these awards for bringing huge businesses to the bank within a few months. His role as a highly rated relationship manager was appreciated by the group and he had become a huge asset for the bank,” the official told TOI.
According to Deswal, initially, just after his arrest, Puri used to talk very confidently to the police. But in the next few days he started revealing his deeds. “We gave him a register to write down a few things, only with the intention that he should get tired of all this and start realizing that he has to share with us what he actually did in this case,” another investigator said.
Sources said that Puri started sharing details of the scam engineered by him after he started realizing that he had no other option but to do so. According to sources, Puri had kept the secret of his scheme of things to himself and had not even told anything to his parents or kin.
According to police officers, Prem Nath and Sheila Prem Nath are not his real grandparents. Prem Nath is Puri’s grand uncle. “We are still investigating whether Puri did everything on his own and had won over the trust of his parents and Prem Nath to operate their accounts in Citibank and other banks. But since the investors’ money was diverted to their bank accounts, we are not ruling out their involvement,” said a senior police officer.
Meanwhile, there were reports of police teams visiting Chandigarh and Kolkata to get clues about Puri’s family members. Sources said that cops have been visiting Puri’s flat at Hamilton Court frequently, but they could find only four servants in the house.
Sources said that one of the teams spent a day in Kolkata to trace Puri’s parents. They added that another team was sent to Chandigarh after cops got inputs of his relatives staying there. But Puri’s relatives there told cops that they had no information about their whereabouts.