Glenda Anderson, Staff ReporterA SPECIAL audit has been ordered into the accounts of the St. Andrew Integrated People's Cooperative Bank as allegations mount that unsuspecting depositors have been fleeced of hundreds of thousands of dollars.
The bank, which serves mainly small farmers in rural St. Andrew, is being investigated by officials of the Agricultural Credit Board (ACB) who are now desperately trying to find out how the farmers' accounts were pilfered.
In several instances, unexplained withdrawals were purported to have been made by infirm, bedridden and senile senior citizens from their accounts.
Relatives for one affected customer report that the account holder, an 85-year-old retired farmer had a balance of $300,000 with the bank. Yet upon his death in September last year, the account contained less than half the amount.
When his daughter, a co-signee of the account, made inquiries a representative of the PC bank cancelled the original passbook, took it away and issued a duplicate passbook with the new figure to rectify the discrepancies.
The relatives were later told by the female bank supervisor that the account holder had made purchases of a Certificate of Deposit (CD) which would have accounted for the missing funds.
But relatives contend that the passbook had been tampered with.
"The passbook had liquid paper corrections, and mathematical errors, and just the unprofessional way we were dealt with. There was one time when we showed the agent a $10,000 error and she simply wrote it in the bottom," Whitfield Forrester, son-in-law of the customer, explained.
To compound matters, Mr. Forrester said he was told that his father-in-law who was not only senile, but unable to leave his bed, much less walk outside, went to the bank and withdrew funds from his account. Having heard this, he immediately wrote a letter to the regulatory body, the ACB to register his suspicions and concerns.
Investigators from the Board who were called in later found instances of other irregularities with other accounts at the bank. When contacted, the bank manager of the St. Andrew Integrated People's Cooperative Bank refused to comment on the situation and insisted that the matter was now with the investigators and police. Director of the regulatory ACB, Fenton Gregory, explained however that the problem was not new to the agency.
"We have been having some problems with that bank but the matter has been handed over to the police and the Fraud Squad have also been called in." He said that a full investigation including interviews with staff members is set to begin tomorrow to probe the matter further.
Checks with the Fraud Squad headquarters in Kingston for details on the investigations were futile. One official, Superintendent Samuels, said that the agency had no knowlege of the situation even after communication with the officer in charge of government accounts under which the PC bank case would have fallen. He explained that the deputy in charge of that area was not in office.
However, relatives of the now deceased farmer are not satisfied with the pace of the investigations. The account has now been frozen pending the outcome of the investigations and they claim there has been no official update on the situation. "Five months is a long time to wait. The money has not gone back to the the account although the CD matured in November of last year and we are told the police is still investigating. We want it to be settled now because his widow needs the money. Right now it seems like double jeopardy."
