A bank alert about five cheques worth nearly Rs 50 crore led veteran Tamil actor Radha to file a police complaint against her own siblings in Chennai.
An email from IDBI Bank's Porur branch on September 17 is what set this off. Veteran Tamil actor Udayachandrika, known to everyone as Radha, got an alert that five high-value cheques had been presented for encashment in her sister Ambika Nair's name. Total value: close to Rs 50 crore. Radha says she never wrote them.
She moved fast, asking the bank to stop payment on all five, valued individually at Rs 11 lakh, Rs 13.17 crore, Rs 27.73 crore, Rs 7 crore and Rs 1.79 crore, according to PTI. Then, on Monday, she walked into the Greater Chennai Police Commissioner's office with a formal complaint naming Ambika and their brother, Mallikarjuna Kunjan Nair, also known as Arjun Nair.
The cheques themselves have a backstory. They're from a 50-leaf cheque book issued in 2022 to Radha's business, then called ARS Garden Studio. The firm's name changed to RR Gardens in January 2025 under GST rules, and Radha got a fresh cheque book to go with it. The old leaves, in her account, became scrap. Worthless paper she'd shoved aside in her room at the Valasaravakkam house she shares with Ambika.
Except some of those blank cheques were signed, kept that way for maintenance bills and staff salaries whenever Radha was travelling for work. And that, she alleges, is what her siblings went after.
Her complaint states the cheques carry Mallikarjuna's handwriting. She's also alleged he's under financial pressure tied to a FEMA case, pending before the Madras High Court since 2025, that left him facing a penalty. Nothing in the complaint claims Ambika or Mallikarjuna have responded to these charges, and Bollywood Hungama notes the allegations will now go through police investigation.
What makes this uglier than a straightforward fraud case is the address. Ambika lives in the same house, on the same property, with access to Radha's portion built on years of family trust. Radha's complaint accuses her siblings of "trespassing" into that room to lift the cheques. Bollywood Shaadis reported that Radha has separately said she's now being kept from checking her own valuables kept there, gold, diamonds, property papers, and claimed this state of affairs has run for close to a year and a half, though that timeline isn't detailed in the cheque complaint itself.
Radha wants criminal action under the Bharatiya Nyaya Sanhita. No FIR details or arrests have been reported yet, and neither Ambika nor Mallikarjuna has issued a public response to the allegations as of this filing.
What happens next depends on the Chennai police. A cheque-fraud complaint of this size, running into tens of crores, against your own sibling, isn't the kind of thing that stays quiet for long in the Tamil film industry. Whether it turns into an FIR, and whether Ambika responds publicly, will decide how this plays out from here.
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