Congress MLA and former Maharashtra minister Sunil Kedar was sentenced to five years’ rigorous imprisonment in a 20-year-old bank fraud case by a Nagpur court on Friday. The magistrate’s court found the Congress leader and five others guilty in the case regarding the misappropriation of funds at the Nagpur District Central Cooperative Bank (NDCCB). Kedar was the chairman of the bank at the time.
Apart from the five-year prison terms, Kedar and the five others were also fined Rs 12.50 lakh each.
Around 2001-2002, when Kedar was the chairman of the bank, it had purchased bonds worth Rs 150 crore without seeking prior permission from the board of directors. He and others were accused of flouting norms by diverting the cooperative bank’s funds, mostly belonging to farmers, to several private entities for purchasing government securities. These companies didn’t give those purchased bonds to the bank and later they declared bankruptcy. Thus, NDCCB lost all its money along with the savings of depositors.
The CB-CID was investigating the case and had filed the charge sheet on November 22, 2002. Since then, the matter was pending in court. In the investigation, it was revealed that the bank had purchased the bonds through Home Trade Limited Mumbai, Indramani Merchants Private Limited Kolkata, Century Dealers Private Limited Kolkata, Syndicate Management Services Ahmedabad, and Guilt-age Management Services. Along with Sunil Kedar, Ashok Choudhary, Ketan Seth, Subodh Bhandari, Nandkishor Trivedi, and Amit Verma were found guilty, while Prakash Poddar, Suresh Peshkar, and Mahindra Agarwal were acquitted by the court.
In January, Sunil Kedar was sentenced to one year’s imprisonment by the Nagpur district sessions court in a 2017 case of physically assaulting a government official.
The Congress leader comes from a political family, as his father Babasaheb Kedar was a cooperative leader and former minister. Sunil Kedar started his political career by contesting the zila parishad elections in 1992. From 1995 till 2019, he contested and won the state assembly polls from the Savner constituency near Nagpur.
Sunil Kedar is considered a strongman of the Congress in Vidarbha. In the recent zila parishad elections in Nagpur, he led his side to victory. Kedar is also considered to be close to Congress leader Kamal Nath. During last month’s assembly polls in Madhya Pradesh, Kedar was stationed in the Chhindwara constituency and campaigned very hard for Kamal Nath. A few months ago, his name was in consideration for the post of leader of opposition in the Maharashtra assembly after a faction of the Nationalist Congress Party (NCP) led by Ajit Pawar broke away and joined the Eknath Shinde-Devendra Fadnavis government. Kedar was also considered for the post of Maharashtra state Congress president, but the party later gave that responsibility to Nana Patole.
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