Prisha Pearls Owners And 3 Postal Employees Booked For Rs7.6 Cr Fraud

Hyderabad: The Central Bureau of Investigation sleuths booked a cheating case against Prisha Pearls Jewellers in the city and three employees of the postal department for causing Rs 7.66 crore loss to the department.

According to the CBI officials, Sailesh, director of Prisha Pearls obtained license for using Remotely Managed Franking Machine (RMFM) in 2013 which enables the operator to book Value Payable Letter (VPL) and Value Payable Parcel (VPP) articles from customers from a remote location. The license holder pays to the postal department a part of the fee collected from his customers for affixing stickers containing barcode generated by the RMFM on parcels and letters.

In January 2015, the company again applied for another RMFM license for a new machine. After getting the second license, Sailesh cancelled the first license of the machine. Even after the cancellation of the first license, the firm director continued to use both the machines. Despite of the stickers produced by both the machines, they also took the photocopies of the stickers and pasted on the parcels, which created huge discrepancy in the number of articles booked by the firm and revenue credited to the department.

With collussion of the postal officials, the firm directors sent 32,91,564 articles under VPL and VPP at Humayun Nagar sub-post office but paid for only 14,66,063 articles, causing Rs7.66 crore loss to the department. Based on the complaint lodged by HR Chandra Shekar Achar, senior superintendent of post office, the CBI officials registered a case against the postal department employees N. Kameswara Rao, sub-post master, S. Padmavathi, the deputy sub-post master and S. Venkata Swamy sub-post master of Humayunagar Sub Post Office and the main accused Sailesh Agarwal and Nitish Agarwal director of Prisha Pearls India Pvt Ltd.

According to the rules of the postal department, the sub-post master has to submit a statement of mailing along with the articles presented for dispatch and also the postal officials has to maintain a register for each franking machine. The employees were failed to follow the procedures and were booked.