The country’s second largest public sector bank, Punjab National Bank (PNB), stunned the country’s banking sector when it reported on Wednesday a fraud amounting to about Rs 11,400 crore from a single branch in Mumbai involving billionaire jeweller Nirav Modi, his firms and his partners including his wife, brother and uncle.

Chairman and Managing Director of PNB, Sunil Mehta, while addressing a press conference in Delhi on Thursday, said that the bank has taken action to book culprits and protect its financial interests.

“PNB has the capability and capacity to recover from the crisis. If the entire onus is on us, we will take responsibility,” Mehta said.

Nirav Modi had already left India on 1 January before PNB filed its first FIR with the CBI.

Mehta said, “We have scanned all our branches and have not come across any similar incidents. This is a stand-alone case in one of our branches. We detected this in the third week of January (2018) following which we launched investigation and approached the CBI on 29 January. The FIR was filed on 30 January.”

Financial Services Secretary in the Union Finance Ministry, Rajiv Kumar, said that the bank has sufficient funds and it will make provisioning for it. “Whole lot of assets will be recovered. Nobody will be spared,” Kumar said. PNB has already suspended 10 officials so far.

Nirav Modi, in an email communication, had reached out to PNB with a “vague” plan to repay loans.

Mehta said the bank has asked Nirav to submit a revised payment plan to help recover the cash routed through fraudulent transactions to some companies linked to him, and hasn’t sought any bailout fund from the government.

Meanwhile, the Enforcement Directorate conducted searches at 17 premises of Nirav Modi and Geetanjali Gems across the country, including in Delhi, Mumbai and Gujarat, in cases relating to fraud in PNB. The ED has reportedly seized stock of gold, jewellery and precious stones worth Rs 5,100 crore in these raids.

The loan fraud ~ the largest ever in Indian history ~ has sent PNB’s shares tumbling more than 20 per cent in two trading sessions to end at Rs 128.35 on Thursday.