JOIN USThe mystery behind the riches of T M Ramalingam, a copra and groundnut trader from Dharapuram in Tamil Nadu’s Tiruppur district, was unravelled on Friday with the Income Tax (I-T) department saying that the US Treasury Bonds worth $ 5 billion recovered from him were fake.
The Barclays Bank, to whom the five seized papers, each with a face value of $ 1 billion, were referred to by the I-T department, have confirmed in writing that the documents “were all bogus.”
A senior official of the I-T Investigation wing in Chennai told Deccan Herald that he had received a communication from the Barclays Bank stating that their “internal assessment is that these documents are fraudulent.”
Ramalingam had hit the headlines recently after he claimed that the documents were US Treasury Bonds, valued at a staggering Rs 27,000 crore in Indian currency. His assertions triggered speculations on how a trader of his means acquired the bonds, particularly after the US Treasury stopped issuing bonds of face value $ 1 billion.
In a day-long interrogation, Ramalingam had told the I-T investigators that the documents were International Bills of Exchange and not Treasury Bonds. He claimed to have obtained the documents from a Brazilian in Dubai against gold bonds of the same value.