Former PSU director arrested for cheating in Delhi

The man, a former executive director of a government of India public sector undertaking, had incorporated two companies and started funnelling away payments originally made in the name of the defrauded company,officials said.

The Economic Offences Wing (EOW) unit of Delhi Police on Thursday arrested a 62-year-old man from his Mayur Vihar residence in east Delhi for allegedly defrauding a company of over ₹30 crore. The man, a former executive director of a government of India public sector undertaking, had incorporated two companies and started funnelling away payments originally made in the name of the defrauded company,officials said.

TOPSHOT - A Delhi police barrier blocks a street during a Delhi state-wide weekend curfew imposed by the authorities to curb the spreading of the Covid-19 coronavirus in New Delhi on January 8, 2022. (Photo by Prakash SINGH / AFP) (AFP)

Special commissioner of police (EOW) Ravindra Singh Yadav identified the arrested man as Ajay Khera, and said that after voluntarily retiring from Central Warehousing Corporation – a public undertaking of the central government – he joined World Window India Impex Private Limited as president. “It was a group company of Seagull Maritime Agencies Private Limited, which deals in freight forwarding business in India. In 2010, Seagull started a branch in the US. Khera requested the promoters of Seagull to employ his son, Siddharth Khera, 32, to look after the US branch of the company. Accordingly, his son was appointed as business development manager at the US branch of Seagull. However, the annual revenue of Seagull dropped drastically from 2018 to its lowest in 2021,” he said.

He added that during investigation, they found that Ajay Khera incorporated two companies – Azure Freight and Logistics LLP in November 2020 and Azure International LLC in June 2020. “He also started a parallel business by taking away the clientele of Seagull through misrepresentation and forgery. Not only that, the accused, in connivance with the employees of mother company Seagull forged many bills and invoices, to dishonestly funnel the payments made by the client of Seagull for shipments made by Seagull to the accounts of Azure International LLC,” he said.

The special CP also said that the accused also changed the name of the shipper in the bills from Seagull to Azure despite those orders being fulfilledby Seagull. “The accused also replaced the original hard drives of their computers and caused a loss of ₹30 crore or more to the Seagull,” Yadav said.

He also said that after the preliminary enquiry, police have registered under sections 408 (criminal breach of trust), 420 (cheating), 467 (forgery of valuable security), 468 (forgery for the purpose of cheating), 471 (fraudulently using forged document as original) and 120B (criminal conspiracy) of the IPC at the EOW police station.