A woman employee of a jewellery chain was arrested in Ranchi in Jharkhand on Thursday for allegedly manipulating documents and stealing jewellery worth around Rs 85 lakh in Kolkata.
The company has two stores in Kolkata— one on Lee Road and the other at Salt Lake City Centre — and one in Mumbai.
The jewellery chain had reported the fraud to the police after officials discovered that a large number of jewellery items that were taken out of the company’s head office on Lee Road for delivery to the other store in the city or to customers were missing.
Records had been forged to give the impression that the items had been sold or shifted to other stores, the police said.
Based on the complaint lodged by the general manager of the company, Neelam Sahu was arrested from a guesthouse in Jharkhand’s Ranchi on Thursday.
The police said Sahu had been appointed by the company in 2008 and was in charge of the Salt Lake City Centre store.
Last January, Sahu was the first to raise an alarm about a piece of jewellery that was allegedly missing.
“Neelam Sahu as store manager was responsible for the cash and stock at the City Centre store. On December 30, 2021, she informed her employers that one specific piece of jewellery was missing,” said an officer of the anti-fraud section of Kolkata police's detective department.
The company started an internal inquiry and realised that several pieces of gold jewellery encrusted with precious stones, worth Rs 85.39 lakh, were missing.
“It became apparent that stock records were fudged and bills manipulated to give the impression that the missing items had been shifted to other stores or sold,” said the officer.
The alleged fraud had been carried out between Diwali and Christmas 2021, the police said.
The matter was reported to the police in January last year.
“It was found that Amit Sharma, an employee of the chain who was assigned the task of carrying jewellery from the head office on Lee Road to the Salt Lake store and to homes of customers, was involved in the theft,” the officer said.
Sharma, a resident of Lake Town, and another person named Panchu Gopal Das, a resident of Baguiati, were arrested last year.
“After questioning Sharma we came to know about Sahu's involvement in the crime. A resident of Narendrapur, on the southern fringes of the city, Sahu had been on the run for several months. She was finally tracked down to a guesthouse in Jharkhand,” the officer said.
She has been charged with forgery, fraud, criminal breach of trust and criminal conspiracy.