About 800 cases disposed of last year despite COVID-19: CBI chief

He emphasises need for officials to keep themselves updated with latest tools of investigation through sustained training

About 800 cases were disposed of last year despite the challenges posed by the COVID-19 outbreak, CBI Director Rishi Kumar Shukla said on Friday.

Addressing the agency officials via videoconferencing, Mr. Shukla paid condolences to the family members of the officials who lost their lives due to the pandemic.

He emphasised the need for officials to keep themselves updated with the latest tools of investigation through sustained training. New and well innovated online training modules were now available as a fallout of the pandemic-induced restrictions.

Filling up vacancies

Mr. Shukla said efforts were made to fill up the existing vacancies, hold maximum Departmental Promotion Committee meetings, whereby a number of officials were promoted. The CBI had recently taken up a large number of high value bank fraud cases, which marked an emerging challenge before it.

The agency registered about 190 cases of bank fraud in 2020, involving alleged misappropriation of close to ₹60,000 crore. While in about a dozen cases, the companies and their top functionaries were accused of cheating banks of over ₹1,000 crore, the prima facie embezzled amount exceeded ₹100 crore in more than 70 cases.

Over 50 of the total bank fraud cases were registered by the CBI units in Delhi, and nearly 30 were instituted in Mumbai, apart from some others in Pune and Nagpur. While the Chennai unit made 17 cases, at least 16 cases were registered in Gujarat’s Gandhinagar.

Several cases were taken up by the agency units in Bengaluru, Chandigarh, Bhopal, Jabalpur, Lucknow, Visakhapatnam, Cochin, Madurai, Jammu, Srinagar, Dehradun, Shimla, Bhubaneswar, Guwahati and Ghaziabad.

The largest amount of ₹7,926 crore was involved in a case registered last December against Hyderabad-based Transstroy (India) Limited and others.

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