Man stays at 5-star hotel in Delhi for 2 years without payment, FIR lodged

A five-star hotel in New Delhi has alleged to have suffered a loss of Rs 58 lakh when one of its guests colluded with some hotel staff and stayed for almost two years without making any payment. The hotel, Roseate House in Aerocity near the Indira Gandhi International (IGI) Airport, has lodged a case at the IGI Airport police station.

Ankush Dutta checked in on 30 May, 2019 and booked a room for one night. He was supposed to check out the very next day on 31 May but he kept on extending his stay till 22 January, 2021.

The FIR alleges that Prem Prakash, head of the Front Office Department of the hotel, who was authorised to decide room rates and had access to the hotel computer system to track dues of all guests, allowed Dutta’s long stay.

The hotel management suspects that Prakash might have received some cash amount from Dutta for letting him overstay by manipulating its in-house software system that maintains and monitors the stay of guests and their accounts.

The alleged staff of the hotel forged, deleted, added accounts entries and falsified a large number of entries in the account of Dutta in the Opera software system of the hotel.

According to the FIR, Prakash didn’t make any outstanding payment report from 30 May, 2019 to 25 October, 2019. Even when he created the outstanding payment report after 25 October, he forged it by clubbing pending bills of other unrelated guests into one bill with the motive to camouflage the pending dues of Dutta.

The hotel has alleged that Prakash resorted to various modus operandi to help Dutta enjoy a long stay there. He even fudged the account to show that other guests, who stayed in the hotel, paid for Dutta which turned out to be fabricated.

The scrutiny of record of the alleged officials of the hotel revealed that they created several fake and false pending bills to benefit Ankush Dutta by adopting various ways like by removing room nights from his bills, transferring his debits into the bills of other guests’ bills, using settled bills of other guests by incorporating his name in the bill, etc, the FIR said.

The hotel also noticed that Dutta paid three cheques of Rs 10 lakh, Rs 7 lakh and Rs 20 lakh at different dates but all of them bounced and Prakash didn’t bring this fact to the notice of the hotel management.

The hotel has demanded legal action against the culprits. A preliminary inquiry by the IGI police showed that prima facie the offences were made out, and now they are further probing the matter.

With inputs from agencies

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