ED takes chit fund group chief Prashant Das on 14-day remand

The Enforcement Directorate had moved the Khurdha district and sessions court here on September 19 to take Das on remand for interrogating him in the alleged Rs 700 crore chit fund scam by his group.

Last month, the CBI had raided premises of Seashore in Dhenkanal, Balasore districts including the houses of Das in Bhubaneswar. The
State CID which initially probed the case, had seized Seashore Group’s properties valued at more than Rs 300 crore.

Established in 2004, the Seashore group started as a corporate agency of SBI Life Insurance, but soon forayed into a host of fields including money circulation, real estate, media, gold trading, insurance, healthcare, pharmaceuticals, ayurveda, retailing, education, agriculture, FMCG, transport and food processing. It soon ventur to States like Jharkhand, Chhattisgarh, Bihar, West Bengal, Andhra Pradesh, Maharastra, Assam, Gujarat, Delhi, Meghalaya, Kerala, Tamil Nadu and Karnataka. But the company cheated its investors who had deposited money allured by huge returns that it promised.

Last month, regional director of ED Yogesh Gupta wrote to Orissa chief secretary complaining about the inordinate delay in handing over the documents of chit fund group Artha Tatwa to probe allegations of money laundering in the Rs 500 crore Artha Tatwa chit fund scam under the provisions of Prevention of Money Laundering Act 2002.

In May this year, the Supreme Court had asked the CBI and ED to probe the 44 chitfund groups that defrauded lakhs of people in the State.