New Delhi: Former CEO of ICICI Bank Padma Shri and Padma Bhushan Chanda Kochhar and her husband Deepak Kochhar, once considered a symbol of women empowerment, have been arrested in a scam worth hundreds of crores. On Friday (December 23), the CBI summoned both of them for questioning. Officials have told that during the interrogation, Chanda Kochhar and her husband Deepak Kochhar were reluctant and were not answering the questions. After this CBI arrested both of them.
Today on Saturday (December 24) both the accused of the scam will be presented in the special CBI court. CBI has taken this action in the case of ICICI Bank and Videocon loan fraud. At the time of Chanda Kochhar, ICICI Bank had given a loan of Rs 3,250 crore to Videocon, which later became Non-Performing Asset (NPA). If we say NPA in a common language, then this money got drowned. ICICI Bank had given a loan of Rs 3,250 crore to Videocon Group from 2009 to 2012. Out of this, 86 percent (about Rs 2,810 crore) loan was not repaid by Videocon. After this, in the year 2017, ICICI Bank put this loan in the NPA account. At that time the chief of ICICI Bank was Chanda Kochhar.
It is alleged that Chanda Kochhar had given this loan to Videocon on the condition that Videocon would invest money in Chanda's husband Deepak Kochhar's company. Videocon Group's former chairman Venugopal Dhoot had invested crores of rupees in Kochhar's company NuPower Renewables from the loan money. Chanda Kochhar herself was part of the committee that approved the loan to Videocon. Later, when this matter came to light, there was an uproar. The CBI registered an FIR on 24 January 2019 and named Chanda, her husband Deepak Kochhar, and Videocon's Venugopal Dhoot as accused.
Actually, this matter came to the fore when ICICI Bank and Videocon's shareholder Arvind Gupta accused of fraud. In 2018, Arvind Gupta wrote a letter to the Prime Minister, RBI, and SEBI accusing Videocon MD Dhoot and ICICI Bank CEO Chanda Kochhar of favoring each other.
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