A special court on Tuesday sentenced a 67-year-old man to life imprisonment for fraudulently withdrawing Rs 1.04 crore from a bank by forging signatures of a Dubai-based NRI from 1996 to 1999.

The court also imposed a cumulative fine of Rs 5.03 crore on Narendra Patel. CBI court judge S R Tamboli convicted Patel under sections 467 (Forgery of valuable security), 420 (cheating and dishonestly inducing delivery of property) and other relevant sections of the Indian Penal Code (IPC). According to the prosecution, Hussain Nensey, a resident of UAE, had, in 1996, opened a term deposit of Rs 1 crore for three years at the SBI's Hughes Road branch in south Mumbai. The fraud was detected in 1999 when Nensey visited the branch for a business loan against his deposit, it said.