New Delhi: The CBI arrested six people in connection with one of the 44 chit fund cases it is probing on orders from the Supreme Court of India, the agency said on Friday.
The six accused, Surinder Kumar, Praveen Kumar Sharma, Ashish Kumar Sinha, Subhash Chandra Rout, Ramesh Patra, and Jugal Madhav Khandual were employed by Golden Land Developers India Ltd, which ran a Ponzi scheme, duping depositors by promising unreal returns on their investments.
The Central Bureau of Investigation said the accused, which include Directors and GMs of the company, collected more than Rs 862 crore from unsuspecting investors in Odisha, West Bengal, Assam, and other states. The Delhi-Chandigarh-based company is one of the Ponzi scheme companies that the probe agency is looking into for cheating investors.
The CBI said the accused company had collected money from depositors between 2011 and 2014 and the case was initially registered with Odisha Police in Angula district.
According to the probe agency, the six accused collected money from investors in Odisha on behalf of Golden Land Developers, which included Rs 1.02 crore from 68 depositors in the state.
The CBI said that the accused persons in the case had not returned the invested amount and cheated investors, thereby misappropriating the collected funds.
The six were arrested on Thursday and were subsequently remanded to judicial custody.
The company in 2017 had expressed interest in refunding the collected money to its depositors by selling of its properties. It claimed that its properties worth Rs 100 crore were attached by government agencies and had seeked permission from Odisha's High Court to proceed with the sale.
Following this, the Justice MM Das Commission had started the process of identifying affected investors.
Golden Land Developers is just one of the many chit fund companies that ran rampant before the Apex Court had asked the CBI to take over the probe in all the cases sometime in 2014.