Syndicate Bank case: Jain tried hard to evade CBI

For around an hour before a Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) team closed in on him at a Mumbai five-star hotel, Syndicate Bank’s chairman and managing director SK Jain had allegedly known he was a wanted man and tried to give a slip to the agency.

For around an hour before a Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) team closed in on him at a Mumbai five-star hotel, Syndicate Bank’s chairman and managing director SK Jain had allegedly known he was a wanted man and tried to give a slip to the agency.

At least two car-borne CBI teams had joined the search on Mumbai’s streets for Jain, even as hundreds of kilometres away, in Bengaluru, another of its team was knocking at the doors of his residence for a search operation. At the same time, sleuths belonging to CBI’s technical-surveillance unit were monitoring mobile conversations of his close relatives and acquaintances round-the-clock, according to a CBI source.

A car-borne team that was tracking the suspect in Mumbai had however lost him at a traffic signal. “Another team was however dispatched to a Mumbai five-star hotel where we knew he was scheduled to meet somebody. At the hotel, he sent an associate inside the hotel first but our team was already there and nabbed him,” said the source.

The CBI had on Saturday nabbed Jain along with eight others for allegedly accepting a bribe of Rs 50 lakh from a private firm Bhushan Steel Limited for not declaring as non-performing asset the `100 crore loan owed to the bank by the latter.

Jain refuses to give voice samples

Jain and four other arrested accused, including two of his relatives and an alleged middleman, refused to give their voice samples to CBI for their forensic matching of bribe-related conversations intercepted during the CBI’s six-month probe preceding the arrests.

Meanwhile, a Delhi court sent Jain and Neeraj Singal, Bhushan Steel Ltd vice-chairman and managing director, to police custody for four days in a bribery case.

The trail and source of the alleged bribe amount hadn’t yet been unearthed, and Neeraj Singal’s aide, who allegedly has carried the bribe money to Bhopal is still absconding.