The irony: PNB won 3 awards for vigilance in the last 3 years

The case against Punjab National Bank and Nirav Modi is still continuing, with the search for the latter going on.

But what is interesting to note is that the public sector bank won several Vigilance Excellence Awards from the Institute of Public Enterprise.

According to PNB’s official website, the bank won the Corporate Vigilance Excellence Award in for “remarkable achievements of the Bank in Vigilance Administration”. The bank claims it won the award for the second time in succession.

Two of the awards came in 2017 — the year PNB issued 293 LoUs to companies owned by Modi and his family — and were given out by Central Vigilance Commissioner (CVC) KV Chowdary.

READ ALSO: Senior Congress leader launch scathing attack against PM Modi over multi-crore PNB case

In the second week of March last year, PNB’s Chief Vigilance Officer S K Nagpal received a “Corporate Vigilance Excellence Award” from the hands of Chowdary at a “Vigilance Conclave” organized by the Institute of Public Enterprise (IPE), an MBA institute on campus at Osmania University, Hyderabad. Chowdary was the key speaker at the event, the eighth of its kind organized by the institute.

Towards the end of October 2017, the Central Vigilance Commission had organized a Vigilance Awareness Week in New Delhi, where it gave away awards to various PSUs for their anti-corruption work, carried out in adherence to guidelines laid down by the Commission and the Reserve Bank of India.

According to the Commission’s website, PNB bagged the Vigilance Excellence Award for “‘Outstanding’ Achievement in ‘Timely Completion of Disciplinary Proceedings’”. CVC Chowdary presented the award to Nagpal “for completing 92% of the total disciplinary proceedings within the prescribed timelines”.

The CVC has summoned the PNB brass on Monday to answer questions on lapses by the bank’s employees in connection with the alleged Nirav Modi scam. Chowdary is likely to take stock of where the bank erred in allowing the fraud to pass undetected for years.

READ ALSO: Nirav Modi-PNB fraud case: renewal of loans; parties point fingers

The PNB website says the bank won the IPE vigilance award in 2014-15 as well, for “improved handling of complaints, the institution of whistleblowing system, quick disposal of vigilance cases, reduction in outstanding vigilance cases, pruning down of vigilance cases of more than one year etc”.

The citation said PNB had taken various “preventive/anti-corruption measures”, apart from steps such as “job rotation in LODI list/Agreed list to non-sensitive assignments, measures of predictive/corrective vigilance, the introduction of vigilance audit system, the introduction of new Risk-Based Staff Accountability Policy etc”. It noted that the work of the vigilance department had saved the bank over Rs 45 crore, and congratulated it’s then CVO Siva Kumar Gupta.

A senior PNB official said, “Vigilance awards are given based on overall performance. But in any large organization, there can be a few crooks. This LoU fraud was done by a couple of people in one branch in an organization of 70,000 employees with 7,000 bank branches. This does not indicate deterioration in the vigilance standards. However, I agree that there was a failure of the bank’s internal control systems in not detecting the fraud early on.”