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CBI investigating ex-joint chief who led bank fraud investigations in Nirav Modi case
Rajiv Singh, who was recently repatriated to his parent cadre, headed the Bank Fraud and Security Cell of CBI which probes high value bank frauds, and was supervising probes against Nirav Modi.
The Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) is examining at least four desktop computers used by the personal staff its former joint director Rajiv Singh who was recently prematurely repatriated back to his parent cadre in Tripura. Singh was supervising the investigation into high-profile bank fraud cases such as the one involving Nirav Modi.
It isn’t clear whether his repatriation had anything to do with this. On May 23, the government in a surprise move ordered premature repatriation of Singh, who is a 1993 batch Indian Police Service (IPS) officer. The government order specified that Singh was being sent back to Tripura at the request of the state government.
The agency admitted on Monday that the computers were being examined because of the unusually high volume of mails being sent out from Singh’s e-mail account, which was typically accessed, for official purposes, by his personal staff from the four computers.
Interestingly, a week ago, CBI denied any such investigation to Hindustan Times.
On Monday, the CBI spokesperson said: “On May 17, Rajiv Singh’s personal staff could not access his email and the agency got in touch with the National Informatics Centre, the cyber agency of the government. The NIC informed them that due to unusually high number of emails being sent out, the email account was automatically blocked a day before. Since the email account was being accessed from four desktop computers, they are being examined. As of now, the agency has not found any breach of its data.”
Rajiv Singh didn’t reply to phone calls or messages seeking comment.
Before being repatriated, Singh headed the Bank Fraud and Security Cell of CBI which probes high value bank frauds. In the last few months of his tenure, Singh supervised probes against diamond merchant Nirav Modi and his maternal uncle Mehul Choksi as well as the preliminary enquiry into potential criminality in ICICI Bank sanctioning a ₹3,250 crore loan to Videocon Group, whose promoter Venugopal Dhoot had invested in a company founded by Deepak Kochhar, the husband of Chanda Kochhar, the CEO of the bank.
