The Enforcement Directorate (ED) on Tuesday attached the movable and immovable assets of Fine Indisales, a chit fund company worth `47 crore. The attached assets include land worth `19 crore in Mumbai and bank deposits of `28 crore in Kanpur in Uttar Pradesh. The company has been running its business in Odisha, Karnataka and Chhattisgarh while in Odisha it had its branches in Cuttack and Baleswar.
ED sources said the company was earlier probed by the CBI in April last year into the `578-crore scam that was unearthed in July 2009 in Baleswar district. The Sahadevkhunta police in Baleswar district in 2009 had busted a chit fund scam involving several companies and multi-level marketing companies in Baleswar district after an investor complained that he had been duped by Fine Indisales.
The Odisha Crime Branch that took up the investigation in the same year had found that the chit fund money was used by the Fine Indisales to make a film Shadow by visually-challenged actor Naseer Khan.
The CB sleuths had also found evidence that crores of scam money was transferred to the account of the Khan’s production company, Great Entertainment, which had produced the film. Khan was arrested in October 2009 but soon released on bail.
The CB had also frozen bank accounts of the company with deposits of over `191 crore. The agency had found that over 2.5 lakh people had invested over `578 crore in the company.