Bhopal District Court has sentenced the land mafia Ramakant Vijayvargiya (60) to life imprisonment, who had committed a scam of Rs 107 crore by selling land plots, along with imprisonment a fine of Rs 50000 was also slapped.
The fraudster is an engineer by profession. He had cheated 250 people on the pretext of making Panchavati colony in Bhopal. The matter was in the court of ADJ Dharmendra Tanda in Bhopal on Thursday.
He was arrested two years ago by the Crime Branch with the help of Kohefiza police.
District Court's public prosecutor Sabir Siddiqui told that Ramakant did engineering from the college in Ujjain in 1976. After this, work started taking contracts in government departments. Worked on Panchavati Phase-1 on Airport Road in Bhopal in 2002-03. Then started plotting on Phase-2 and Phase-3. He took money from the people by making agreements with the farmers.
Meanwhile, the project got stuck due to estrangement with the farmers. He stole the money he had taken from the customers.
In 2010, the first case of cheating was registered against Ramakant at Kohefiza police station. After this, till now 22 cases have been registered against him in this police station. There are 38 cases registered against Ramakant in Bhopal, Indore and ED. Along with this, more than 100 applicants had filed a case against him in the court.
To avoid the police, Ramakant had changed his appearance. After cheating in Bhopal, he was living as Ramkumar Vyas in a flat located in Vijay Nagar, Indore.
The appearance had also changed by growing beard and hair. Police caught him two years ago. He was coming from Indore to Bhopal by changing his appearance. Not only this, fake identity cards were also made.
Along with supplying Namkeen from Ujjain to Indore, he was also operating a travel agency. Ramakant had also opened a company in the name of District Infrastructure Private Limited. He had used the cheated money in the business of snacks.
However, the police could not recover the amount from him. The victims of the fraud had accused the police officers many times of colluding with Vijayvargiya.