An employee has been charged by a private company with the theft of 291.83 carat diamonds worth Rs. 78 lakh. He was supposed to give the gems to the Surat unit of the company for quality control tests. He is said to have kept them instead of releasing them. The aforementioned diamonds were going to be used in the Tanishq jewellery.

According to the Bandra-Kurla Complex (BKC) police, Umesh Hariba Jadhav, a 34-year-old employee, defrauded the company, according to a complaint made to the police by Harikrishna Bhagwan Tiwari, a 46-year-old manager in a private company. In his complaint, Tiwari claimed that Umesh Jadhav and Hitesh Nirmal had been hired for the company's synthetic screening, lab, and outsourcing activities. Both employees had been employed by the business for the previous four years. They both answered to Ramakrishnan, the office manager.

According to Tiwari, his BKC company manufactures jewellery for numerous prestigious jewellery brands. The quality control section first receives the diamonds and other raw materials that are sent to their BKC office for use in the jewellery created for these businesses. The diamonds are sent for synthetic screening after being evaluated for colour, cut, and quality. 25 percent of these precious stones go through synthetic screening, of which 10 percent is isolated for testing. Umesh Jadhav and Hitesh Nirmal were given the responsibility of sourcing quality assurance (QA) for these separated diamonds.

Jadhav and Nirmal needed to provide the diamonds to Madhukar Phadkil of the dispatch section in order to courier them, and Phadkil would then issue them an invoice.

When the diamonds returned to the BKC office following testing at the Surat lab, both of them would hand over the diamonds to vendor and have them sign the receipt, a copy of the invoice would be stored at the BKC office.

Due to the pandemic, the Government of India introduced a lockdown in March 2020, closing all offices. Businesses did not resume until the lockdown regulations were relaxed in June 2020. Only 30% of the employees showed up to the office during this time. In this instance, it meant that Jadhav would visit the office one day, and Nirmal the next. Starting on January 17, 2021, Jadhav ceased showing up to work. Amish Patel, assistant manager of the quality control division, discovered on January 20, 2021, that the diamonds submitted by one of his vendors and shipped to Surat had not yet arrived. Patel went on to inform the senior officials.

There was no entry for those gems in either the portal or the challan, according to the officials. Jadhav's mobile phone was off when the company tried to contact him; after his emergency number was discovered and his wife was contacted, she informed the business that Jadhav hadn't returned home since January 21 and that she hadn't filed any missing person report .

Following this, it was discovered that a total of 78.33 lakh rupees worth of diamonds belonging to various vendors were missing and that no challan or entry had been made for them. At this moment, Tiwari, the firm manager, reported the incident to the BKC police department. According to a BKC police officer, Jadhav stole diamonds worth a total of RS 78,33,156 between June 2020 and January 2021. 

The BKC police is said to have opened an investigation into Tiwari's complaint after registering a FIR under IPC sections 420 (cheating and dishonestly inducing handover of property) and 408 (criminal breach of trust).

Courtsey - Free Press Journal