TN’s bond turns out to be fake

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Chennai: The international bills of exchange with a face val­ue of US$ 5 billion seized by income tax officials fr­om a businessman from Tirupur have turned outto be fake, according to I-T s­ources .
The Dubai office of Ba­rc­lays Bank which was as­­ked to check the au­the­nticity of the bills, had found they were not ge­nu­ine, they disclosed. “We have more evide­nce now to show the bu­si­ness­man, T.M. Ramalin­g­am that his bills are fake. We hope to pin his lies wh­­en he appears before the investigators on Frid­ay,” said a senior I-T offi­c­­­er. It was the Barclays Ba­­nk in Chennai which inf­ormed the IT investig­a­­­t­ors about the suspici­o­us bills of exch­ange, ori­g­i­­­n­­ating from Ramali­ng­am, doing the rounds in TN.
Armed with the information, a decoy team of the department approached Ramalingam on Dec.  31. “Our team asked for a bill of excha­nge of smaller denomination than it was carrying.  But  he sa­id he dealt only with big­ger denominations and produced his billion- do­llar bills. The team seized all the “5 billion” dollar bills from him. We bel­ieve  he cheated people by giving them fake international bills of exchange, but was ex­posed when they tried to exchange them at a foreign ba­nk,” said an income tax official.
Ramalingam has , however, claimed that he received the bills from an exchange in Brazil after swapping his 90 year-old gold bonds for them through an agent in that country.