Khaitan and Partners has acted for long-standing clients Jet Airways in a criminal action instituted against an individual who allegedly siphoned off Rs 2.07 crores from the airline’s account by seeking double refunds on the cancellation of 163 airline tickets.

Partner Niladri Bhattacharjee and associate Pratik Ghose with the help of the Kolkata cyber crime division followed up the alleged fraudster Mukesh Kishanpuria's attempts to escape prosecution.

The firm’s Kolkata office ensured that anticipatory bail was declined to issue of non-bailable warrants against garment exporter Kishanpuria, who utilised his computer knowledge to extract double refunds on individual high-value ticket cancellations.

Upon acquiring knowledge that Jet Airways took 40 seconds to pass information from its server to mainframe, the alleged accused along with his aide used the same modus operandi to get both manual as well as online refunds on cancelled bookings.

A cyber crime detective told the Times of India: “The moment his aide completed the cancellation over the counter and the Jet executive clicked the cancel button, he would beep Mukesh who would hit the OK button to complete a double cancellation.”

“This procedure he had adopted for taking refund on 163 tickets and all of these tickets were high value tickets and the same were refunded twice in his credit card accounts. The credit cards though surprisingly showed zero balance and not positive balance at the end of each month which shows that the person used to take back this whole amount each month for his own purpose and unjustly enrich himself,” said Khaitan and Partners in a statement.

Khaitan and Partners had earlier this year also represented Jet Airways in a criminal case against striking pilots.