Bank ordered to pay Rs 23 lakh in 10-yr-old case

The district consumer forum has asked American Express Bank to pay damages amounting to about Rs 23 lakh to passengers whose travellers cheques (TC) were stolen from their travel agent 10 years ago.

In 1998, 49 people hired Cosmic Travels as their travel agent to go for Haj. The passengers handed over their passports, visas, other documents and TCs worth Rs 25,500 each to Ebrahim Kolsawala, a partner of Cosmic Travel for submission to the Royal Saudi Embassy in Delhi.

Kolsawala completed all the formalities and even got the visas on December 9, 1998. However, after all the documents were stolen from Kolsawala's car, he contacted American Express Bank and asked them to stop payment on the cheques and refund the amount. "We followed the correspondence for almost a year. The bank kept delaying the payment, and we had to file a consumer complaint in December 2000," said Kolsawala.

The bank argued that the passengers had not signed on the upper left corner of the TCs as they were required to at the time of taking possession and, therefore, the amount could not be refunded. The forum, however, held that the bank had failed to prove that the TCs were not signed. "One important reason why TCs are used is that they constitute an insurance against loss through theft as it happened in this case," held the forum.

"The forum has directed the bank to pay to each of the passengers a sum of Rs 25,500 ($ 500) and interest at the rate of nine per cent per annum along with an additional sum of Rs 1,000 to each passenger," said Uday Wavikar, Kolsawala's advocate. The total amount to be paid by the bank comes to Rs 23 lakh. "We won the case after fighting for 10 years. Justice has prevailed," added Kolsawala.

Nadkarni Associates, the bank's lawyers, refused to comment.u00a0