Police stand accused of sitting on a complaint by a businessman against a private bank whose loan recovery agents dragged him out of his Ford Ikon, slapped him and took away the car.

The incident occurred on November 21, when 52-year-old Pradip Sureka and his son Pranay were about to leave their Behala home for work.

“It was around 8.15am. I was in the car with my son Pranay when four youths turned up. Two of them snatched the keys, dragged me out and started beating me up saying I wasn’t repaying the Rs 4.5-lakh car loan I had taken from ICICI bank. I was shocked because I haven’t defaulted on a single EMI,” Sureka said.

The youths drove away after flinging a court document on Sureka’s face. “The document was in the name of Chanda Prasad but the car number mentioned in it was the same as that of my vehicle. I knew the bank had made a mistake,” Sureka said.

When he and his son went to Behala police station, they were made to wait over an hour before an entry was made in the general diary. The police claimed on Tuesday that nobody had been arrested because Sureka did not file a strong complaint.

“Where is the complaint? Just a general diary has been filed. So where is the scope for any arrest?” asked Sunil Kumar Choudhary, the additional SP (industrial) of South 24-Parganas.

But other police officers said a general-diary entry could be converted into a criminal case after an inquiry.

If the police didn’t take Sureka seriously, officials at ICICI Bank’s Upper Wood Street branch allegedly misbehaved with him despite realising they had made a mistake. Rajiv Dubey, the official overseeing loan recovery, is one of the accused.

When Sureka got back the car, he found it damaged and several things, including a briefcase containing Rs 25,000, a portable TV and the music player, missing. He lodged a complaint with Shakespeare Sarani police station.