On April 9, 2014, the Kollam branch of Dena Bank, which merged with Baroda Bank in 2019, urgently summoned six of its former and existing depositors to the branch. The six -- P C Gopakumar, Hariharan, Sylvi Xavier, his wife Jaya Digna George, Krishnakumar and his wife Deepa -- had no clue why. A name connected the four males in the group: Balakrishnan Nair, the senior accountant of the bank.
The four men were school and college mates of Nair. At the branch, they saw for the first time what they had virtually forgotten: the title deeds of the properties their friend Balakrishnan Nair had purchased in their names in January 2013. There was a bigger surprise.
Nair stood before them not as the senior accountant but as an accused who has been siphoning off crores from the bank. The friends were told that the land, registered in their names, were bought with funds misappropriated from the bank. The friends were perplexed.
They had indeed loaned large sums of money to Nair when he told them that he desperately wanted some land near his wife’s house at Erumely. But they had never thought of their friend as a fraud. Gopakumar, an LIC employee, transferred Rs 25 lakh to his friend.
Hariharan, who is in pharmaceutical business, gave a cheque of Rs 38 lakh; he had just then won the first lot of a chitty and had Rs 42 lakh in his account. Krishnakumar, who was working in Kakinada in Andhra Pradesh, asked his wife Deepa to transfer Rs 10 lakh to Nair from his ICICI account. Sylvi Xavier,.