In a high profile land fraud case, the Economic Offence Wing (EOW) of the State Crime Branch sealed the Hi-Tech Group’s corporate office at Saheed Nagar on Saturday.
The EOW sleuths conducted raids at different sections of the office, including education affair section at the first floor and real estate affair at the second and third floors of the four storey corporate office building.
According to the Crime Branch sources, the depositors would be entitled to get some return of their invested money by liquidation, if new law is enacted.
Police have registered five cases against the company for allegedly duping people of over Rs 300 crore through fraudulent land deals. The Crime Branch had also frozen 147 accounts of the company in 18 banks with a deposit of nearly Rs 3 crore.
According to Crime Branch DIG Rajesh Kumar, the agency had received around 1,400 complaints from the investors against Panigrahi. Notably, the investigating agency had on December 25, 2012 arrested Hi-Tech CMD Tirupati Panigrahi and two of his company directors Tirupati Choudhury and Madhusudan Panigrahi for allegedly cheating land buyers of crores of rupees. All the three are in judicial custody after a trial court here in January rejected their bail applications.
Meanwhile, the advocate of the Hi-Tech Group alleged that the sealing of office is illegal as it was done without court’s knowledge, while the probe agency clarified that it has already submitted preliminary charge sheet at the court.
Meanwhile, the Commissionerate Police have started an investigation to seize the property of Pradip Sethy’s Artha Tatwa (AT) Group. After a preliminary inquiry, the police team is examining the documents and other links to find out the movable and immovable property along with bank transactions of the company.
As a first step, the police have already seized a few luxury cars including imported Jaguar from the possession of Sethy and other cars used for company purpose. Even the police exposed the company’s over 207 acres of land property across the State.
In a recent development, the police wrote letters to concerned banks of the AT Group to freeze all its accounts. According to DCP Nitinjit Singh, the company has 230 bank accounts in several places in and outside of the State, including in Kolkata and Mumbai.
According to the police, the seized property of the company is sufficient to refund the investors’ money.