In February, the Kerala government had proposed a plan to raise Rs 50 crore to repay the Karuvannur bank depositors who lost their life’s savings. But now, the victims of the scam feel they are once again being forgotten.
December is the follow-up month at TNM where we go back to headlines of the past for a status update. In this series, we strive to bring focus back to promises made by governments, revisit official investigations that should have been completed by now and exhume issues of public interest that lost steam over time.
Ever since the Rs 100 crore scam at the Karuvannur Service Cooperative Bank in Kerala’s Thrissur came to light in 2019, much has gone down in the state. The Joint Registrar of Cooperation (Thrissur) had ordered a probe into the allegations at the time, which was completed in October 2020, but no action was taken. The scam received media attention a year later in 2021, when 63-year-old TM Mukundan, a former member of the Porathissery panchayat, died by suicide after receiving a foreclosure notice for recovering amounts that he never borrowed. This attention, however, did not last long. In fact, it took yet another tragedy in July this year — the death of 70-year-old Philomena Devassy, a depositor to whom the Karuvannur bank failed to issue money for her treatment — for the massive scam to come to limelight again.
As more depositors began to come out and reveal their plight, one worse than the other, the state’s Left Democratic Front (LDF)…
