The opposition Congress members on Friday staged a walkout in the Assembly as Finance Minister Prasanna Acharya turned down the demand for a CBI probe into the multi-crore chit fund scam in which some Ministers, senior officials and BJD leaders were allegedly involved.
The debate held after the admissibility of an adjournment motion on the chit fund scam continued for about three hours with the opposition Congress and Independent members holding the Chief Minister, his Cabinet colleagues, officials and ruling party leaders responsible for the chit fund scam. Since the Chief Minister and other Ministers blessed the chit fund company authorities in public, the people had no qualms in investing their money.
Participating in the marathon debate, leader of the Opposition Bhupinder Singh, members Chakradhar Paika, Naba Kishore Das, Debi Prasad Chand and Independent member Pratap Sarangi said that the money involved in the scam was huge. It spread over a wide area and involved a number of high ranking officers and politicians, including the Chief Minister.
They regretted that though the State Government had ordered a probe into the scam by the Crime Branch seven months back, the latter had not yet made any significant progress.
Besides, the constitution of a Commission of Inquiry headed by Justice RK Patra was unable to sort out the cases as a huge numbers of petitions have been filed. Hence, the very arrangement of instituting the Commission of Inquiry was nothing but an eye wash, they alleged.
Demanding a white paper on the scam and the steps taken to pay back the money to the genuine duped depositors, the leader of the Opposition and other Congress members said since Assam and Tripura Governments had agreed for CBI inquiry into chit fund scam in their respective States, the Odisha Government should also inform the Supreme Court to go for probe by the Central agency.
Dubbing the announcement of the corpus fund to the tune of Rs300 crore as another ploy to hoodwink the depositors, they alleged that so far not a single pie had been sanctioned towards the fund. Besides, so far, no rules had been framed to pay back the money to the genuine depositors. Besides, the Government had failed to identify the genuine depositors as yet, they said.
Replying to the debate, Finance Minister Prasanna Acharya dismissed the allegations as baseless and rejected the demand for a CBI probe.
Since the Government is concerned and is very sincere about the depositors to get justice and has taken many steps for the early return of their money, its sincerity should not be questioned, he claimed.
Acharya said that the Government had registered cases against the fraud companies whenever it came to its notice and there was no laxity on the part of the Government at any level.
Stating that the investigation by Crime Branch and police was in full swing, he said that so far as action had been taken against 159 erring non-Government financial companies collecting funds from the public and 425 cases had been filed and charge sheets had been filed in 236 cases. As many as 640 persons involved in chit fund scam have been arrested, he said.
The Minister said the Government should not be blamed alone for the scam as both the State and Central Governments were responsible for it. Though a large number of organisations were operating in the State not even one of them was registered under the Chit Fund Act, 1982. The organisations were registered under different laws most of which were controlled by the Central Government agencies and Cooperatives, he said.