Kolkata, Feb 27 The Calcutta High Court on Thursday asked the West Bengal government to submit a detailed report on the pending cases against Sudipta Sen, the Founder and Chairman of the tainted chit fund entity Saradha Group.
A division bench of Justice Justice Joymalya Bagchi and Justice Gaurang Kanth directed the state government to submit the report on the matter at the court within four weeks.
Sen, who was arrested in 2013, had sent a letter to the Chief Judicial Magistrate in Kolkata in 2020, detailing how the corpus of his entity was looted by a section of political leaders as well as a section of his employees. A lower court then also directed a probe based on Sen.’s allegation.
Again in 2024, Sen submitted a prisoner’s petition in the matter claiming that he had no counsel to represent him in the cases pending against him.
The matter was referred to the division bench of Justice Bagchi and Justice Kanth, which then asked the state Correctional Services department to arrange for a counsel for Sen. Now, the same bench had sought a report from the state government on the pending cases against Sen.
In 2012, the entire West Bengal was rocked following the busting of chit-fund rackets operating from the states. The most talked about cases in the matter were those related to the Saradha Group and Rose Valley Group, because of the involvement of several heavyweight political personalities, mainly from the now ruling Trinamool Congress.
The main charges in such cases were about illegally collecting public deposits under different multi-level marketing schemes against promises of abnormal returns and vanishing at the time of paying those returns.
Most of these chit fund entities had their headquarters in West Bengal and they made such collections through a multi-level agents’ network from remote villages in West Bengal, Bihar, Jharkhand, Odisha, Punjab, and Haryana.
The operators have offices and agents’ networks scattered in different important cities in these states.
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