The Delhi High Court has granted bail to another Chartered Accountant in connection with the Bhushan Stell case investigated and registered by Serious Fraud Investigation Office (SFIO) in 2019.
A Partnership Firm- M/s. A.C. Gupta & Associates, Chartered Accountants, of which the Accused, Mr. Pankaj Mahajan, is one of the partners, was appointed by the State Bank of India and the Punjab National Bank to conduct the stock audit of BSL for the Financial Year’s 2014-2015 and 2015-2016 respectively. The Accused had no role whatsoever over the filing of the actual stock statements. The role of the Accused was only limited to data aggregation by physically visiting the various locations of the Company and verifying the stocks and debtors’ report in the stock statement, which was duly signed by the senior officials of the Company and have already been submitted to the Banks.
Granting bail to the accused, Justice Neena Bansal Krishna observed that the role of the petitioner is that of the Stock Auditor wherein the Stock verifications of the documents and statements as submitted by the Company to the Banks was carried out by the accused.
“The main accusations against him are that he did not conduct the Stock Audits diligently and did not raise red flag about the inconsistency as submitted in the documents to the Banks by the Companies. Further, the primary accused, namely, Mr. Neeraj Singhal and Mr. Nitin Johari have already been granted interim bail. The allegations pertain to years-2014-2015 and 2015-2016 and the petitioner neither before nor after has been involved in any criminal offence. Considering all the circumstances, the petitioner is hereby admitted to bail on submitting a Bail Bond and Surety Bond in the sum of Rs.1,00,000/- (one lakh) to the satisfaction of the trial court/Special Judge,” the Court said.
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