Cooperative bank audit unearths Rs34.77-crore fraud at Pune branch; two officials, accomplices booked

Pune: The Pune city police on Wednesday evening registered a case of misappropriation and cheating against two officials of a cooperative bank and their accomplices for allegedly defrauding the financial institution’s Pune branch of Rs34.77 crore between Jan 2018 and Dec 2025.An FIR was registered at the Deccan Gymkhana police station on Wednesday, after which the Pune police’s Economic Offences Wing (EOW) took over the investigation.The case was initiated after a 53-year-old bank auditor lodged a formal police complaint. A recent audit of the bank’s Prabhat Road branch uncovered that the two officers and their associates had systematically misappropriated the Rs34.77 crore over the seven-year period.According to the FIR, the accused officials abused their positions within the financial institution to execute the fraud. They allegedly granted themselves interest-free loans, extended similar zero-interest loans to unapproved third parties, and fabricated corporate details to pass off dummy companies as subsidiaries of the bank. The accused prepared falsified balance sheets, inflated bank maintenance expenses, sold off mortgaged properties without the management’s knowledge, and unauthorisedly credited extra funds into specific borrowers’ accounts.