The Justice MM Das Commission of Enquiry, probing into the chit fund scam in the State for over four years now, on Friday submitted its seventh interim report to the State Government.
Set up in July 2013, Justice Das headed the panel in February 2015 following the death of the then commission Justice RK Patra.
Briefing reporters here, Justice Das said the fresh interim report contains in it the inquiry conducted by the commission from January 1, 2019 to May 31, 2019. “In this phase of the inquiry, the commission has identified at least 1,36,027 small investors who had invested their money in 421 chit fund companies,” Justice Das said.
The commission has recommended to the State Government to pay the identified small investors their invested money from the corpus fund raised by the State Government for this purpose. Notably, the State Government has set up a corpus fund of Rs 300 crore in 2016 to pay the investors, who had invested less than Rs 10,000 in chit fund companies.The commission further informed that so far, at least 1,931 small investors have already got back their invested money from various chit fund companies. The commission is likely to take up the cases of bigger investors after concluding the investigations into the cases of small investors. The commission had received nearly 10 lakh affidavits from the investors from across the State who were duped by nearly 500 chit fund companies with a combined amount of over Rs 3,000 crore.