Lagatar24 Desk
Ranchi, July 30: In a money laundering investigation against the Odisha-based Seashore Group of enterprises suspected of committing an alleged ponzi fraud, the Enforcement Directorate has attached assets worth more than Rs 3.92 crore of a former BJD MLA Pravat Ranjan Biswal and a media company M/s Media Guru Consultants Pvt Ltd, officials said on Saturday.
In a statement, the central agency said that a provisional order under the Prevention of Money Laundering Act (PMLA) had been issued to attach Rs 25 lakh in bank deposits held at the SBI Cuttack branch by Pravat Biswal, a three-time former MLA from the Cuttack-Choudwar assembly seat in Odisha.
The CBI detained Biswal in this matter in 2017. Later, he was granted bail.
The attached assets are worth a total of Rs 3,92,20,000, according to the Enforcement Directorate (ED).
The Seashore Group of companies “fraudulently and dishonestly collected huge amounts from the general public, of which Rs 25 lakh was diverted to the ex-MLA and his family members and Rs 4 crore was diverted to Media Guru Consultants Pvt Ltd to set up a news and current affairs TV channel named STV Samachar,” the ED alleged.
The CBI and the Economic Offenses Wing (EOW) of the Odisha Police filed FIRs and chargesheets against the Seashore Group and its proprietors, which led to the money laundering case.
According to the ED, this was a “ponzi scheme case of fraudulently collecting deposits from the unsuspecting public in the guise of issuing preferential shares by enlisting the depositors as members of cooperative societies.
“These companies were neither registered as non-banking finance company (NBFC) with the RBI nor listed at the National Stock Exchange and as such were not authorised to collect such public deposits,” the agency said.
The document claimed that despite the depositors’ repeated requests and approaches, the accused companies abruptly stopped operating, refused to return money to depositors after maturity, and failed to pay any interest on the accounts.
In this instance, the ED already attached assets worth Rs 258 crore.
