ANSA Bank hails landmark court ruling

ANSA Bank has said that to­day’s rul­ing of the High Court rep­re­sents a vic­to­ry not on­ly for ANSA Bank, but for Trinidad and To­ba­go, as the court has con­firmed that fraud­u­lent acts and re­lat­ed con­spir­a­cy will be brought to jus­tice.

In Oc­to­ber 2023, the bank filed the law­suit against for­mer em­ploy­ees, Randy Gottsleben, Ro­jas, Sankar, Ram­bar­ran, Ram­per­sad, Ram­sa­roop, Gottsleben’s part­ner Ram­s­ingh, Arnold Ram­jass Au­to Me­chan­i­cal & Paint­ing Garage, Cey­lon Mar­ket­ing Ltd, Joalex Au­to Ltd, Mi­va Im­port Ex­port Con­sul­tan­cy Ltd, Di­a­mond Con­cep­tions Com­pa­ny Ltd, and It’s A Deal Ltd.

The bank launched an in­ves­ti­ga­tion af­ter its di­rec­tor Lar­ry Howai re­ceived a let­ter from a whistle­blow­er al­leg­ing mis­con­duct and “dis­re­spect for du­ty”.

The ini­tial in­ves­ti­ga­tion found that there were loan trans­ac­tions not in ac­cor­dance with com­pa­ny pol­i­cy.

A wider in­ves­ti­ga­tion was done at the Ch­agua­nas branch of the bank where the dis­crep­an­cies were found and a con­spir­a­cy was al­leged­ly un­cov­ered where the bank sus­tained loss­es of al­most $30 mil­lion in two-and-a-half years in­volv­ing 35 ve­hi­cles and prop­er­ties.

In the law­suit, the bank al­leged that its for­mer em­ploy­ees and the com­pa­nies en­gaged in a con­spir­a­cy to present fraud­u­lent doc­u­ments and make fraud­u­lent rep­re­sen­ta­tions to help se­cure loans.

De­liv­er­ing the judg­ment, Jus­tice Frank Seep­er­sad up­held the bank’s mul­ti-faceted case against its for­mer busi­ness de­vel­op­ment of­fi­cer Dwayne Ro­jas.

“The pur­suit of this judg­ment re­flects our com­mit­ment to main­tain­ing the high­est stan­dards of in­tegri­ty and ac­count­abil­i­ty across all ar­eas of our op­er­a­tions. At ANSA Bank, we have de­vel­oped sys­tems guid­ed by in­ter­na­tion­al best prac­tice aimed at strength­en­ing our in­ter­nal con­trols and over­sight mech­a­nisms, that are ro­bust and re­silient,” the Bank said.

It added, “We re­main ful­ly ded­i­cat­ed to pro­tect­ing our cus­tomers, our em­ploy­ees and the fi­nan­cial sys­tem of Trinidad and To­ba­go. We will con­tin­ue to co­op­er­ate with all rel­e­vant au­thor­i­ties as re­quired.”