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Wednesday, July 23, 2025

Sri Lankan on $1.9m fraud charge fined

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20140618

A Sri Lankan na­tion­al who cre­at­ed a fic­ti­tious bank ac­count state­ment to try to se­cure a $1.9 mil­lion loan from an­oth­er fi­nan­cial in­sti­tu­tion was yes­ter­day fined $7,500.Anoj Jana­ka Adrikari Mudiyanse­lage, 40, who has been liv­ing in T&T for 14 years, plead­ed guilty be­fore San Fer­nan­do Sec­ond Court Mag­is­trate Siu­mun­gal Ram­saran to two charges aris­ing out of the fraud­u­lent trans­ac­tion.Court pros­e­cu­tor Sgt Veano Ra­goo said the ac­cused went to the RBC Roy­al Bank, San Fer­nan­do, to ob­tain a loan on Feb­ru­ary 26.

In do­ing so, Ra­goo said he pre­sent­ed a state­ment from First Cit­i­zen Bank Ltd's branch at Mon­trose Main Road, Ch­agua­nas, for the pe­ri­od No­vem­ber 23, 2013 to April 11, 2014 claim­ing he had a bal­ance of $243,352.81.The state­ment was ac­cept­ed and sub­mit­ted with oth­er doc­u­ments for the loan ap­proval.How­ev­er, it was sub­se­quent­ly dis­cov­ered the FCB ac­count did not ex­ist.The Fraud Squad was con­tact­ed and Mudiyanse­lage was charged.

The mag­is­trate, how­ev­er, dis­missed the first charge which stat­ed he at­tempt­ed to de­fraud the bank by ob­tain­ing the loan us­ing false doc­u­ments.Ex­plain­ing that the word­ing of the charge was wrong, he said the facts out­lined did not es­tab­lish the of­fence since Mudiyanse­lage did not ob­tain the loan.On the sec­ond charge of ut­ter­ing a false doc­u­ment, his at­tor­ney Dane Halls said his client act­ed out of des­per­a­tion rather than to de­ceive be­cause he had gone to the bank for a loan on a pre­vi­ous oc­ca­sion and was re­ject­ed.

Ask­ing for a non-cus­to­di­al sen­tence, he said his client was a first time of­fend­er, plead­ed guilty and it was a non-vi­o­lent of­fence.He added that Mudiyanse­lage, the fa­ther of two–ages ten and 11–was re­morse­ful. The mag­is­trate or­dered the ac­cused to pay the mon­ey in three months or serve three years in jail. (SW)


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