Chennai: The Madras high court has restrained M/s White Screen productions from releasing Tamil film “Aruva Sanda”. Justice C.V. Karthikeyan granted the interim injunction till March 16, on an application arising out of a suit filed by State Bank of India, Velachery branch, which sought to restrain White Screen productions represented by V. Raja and 10 others from releasing the movie until the outstanding amounts are paid to the bank.
According to the bank, V. Raja and 12 of his relatives had independently submitted applications through D. Chitra, who was an auto loan counsellor for purchasing new luxury cars including Audi. Based on the documents, the bank had sanctioned loans ranging from Rs 15 lakh to Rs 54.71 lakh, totally amounting to Rs 2.79 crore.
The branch manager had found some abnormality in the sanctioning of number of loans recommended/sourced by Chitra and as a routine measure, the manager had verified the said loans during October 2017 about the procedure involving pre-sanctioning and post-sanctioning of the loans to them and shocked to note that there were a lot of irregularities, the bank added.
On discreet enquiry and investigation, it was observed that Chitra had misused her position as an auto loan counsellor and hacked the URL of the loan originating software (LOS) through which the loan accounts were uploaded and processed/sanctioned the loans without the knowledge of the officials of the bank from a different mode.
The loan proceeds were credited to their bank accounts. All the amounts were ultimately re-routed to the bank account of V. Esakkiraja, one of the borrowers, who was acting as well as producing the film “Aruva Sanda” through White Screen Productions. The loan proceeds have been utilised for the said film production and as a matter of fact no car was purchased by them.
Hence, the bank lodged a complaint with the police on November 9, 2017. On a direction from the High Court, the Vepery police registered an FIR. But there was no further response.
The 13 borrowers have jointly defrauded the bank by diverting the loan amount for producing the said film. Therefore, the bank has no other security to satisfy the outstanding loan amount, payable to the bank, except to create a charge on the proceeds of the movie, the bank added.
