Odisha chit-fund scam: More skeletons tumble out of Green Ray International cupboards

Even as crime branch sleuths raided the registered office of the Green Ray International Limited (GRIL) at Jaleswar in Balasore district for nearly three days and seized important documents on its business transactions, the probing agency is still clueless about the documents which were shifted to West Bengal (WB) and some other places.

Sources said the GRIL officials had shifted many essential documents to the company’s branches in neighbouring WB and a couple of houses in Jaleswar following ‘The Express’ expose on its fraudulent activities in the guise of gold and silver trading.

Local police though had raided the Jaleswar office after a report in these coloumns on the shifting of documents and sealed the company MD’s chamber, some important documents, which could have exposed their illegal activities, had already been shifted by then. Now two cops have been deployed to guard the three-storied GRIL building.

The CB team has however seized over 2000 passbooks of depositors, agents and depositors' registers, documents related to various investment plans, its pharmaceutical and garment units, mining sector, besides computer hard disks in which data regarding the financial transactions were stored.

They also raided the house of company MD Mir Shahiruddin at Shasanbad where his parents reside before completely sealing the GRIL building, except an Industrial Training Centre (ITC) which is functioning in the ground floor.

Sources informed the CB is said to have got the records of financial transactions of GRIL with banks after banking hour which proves that the banks too had been cooperating the NBFCs in contravention of RBI guidelines.

A senior police official who accompanied them said the probing team also visited Green Ray International School at Jhadeswarpur, a madrassa at Panchughanta and a rice mill in Santia area. Apart from these properties, the company has three under-construction flats in Shasanbad and Panchughanta area and a big land plot in Nandika area where it was to start drinking water bottling plant and washing powder manufacturing factory.

While initially the police had estimated the money collected from the people in the State would be around Rs 2,000 crore, after going through the papers seized by the CB, a source informed that the total money mobilized by the company from 14 states in the country would not be less than Rs 25,000 crore.

GRIL has over 100 operational branches across Maharashtra, Goa, Odisha, Jharkhand, Chhatisgarh, Bihar, West Bengal, Andhra Pradesh, Delhi, Karnataka, Tamilnadu, Haryana, Madhya Pradesh, Uttar Pradesh and Gujarat besides its international branch in Bar Dubai.

Sources informed that the company has two offices in New Delhi, one at Mumbai and four in UP, besides one residential complex and a farm house in Delhi. While its corporate office at Delhi’s Lajpat Nagar area has been taken on a monthly rent of nearly Rs 8.5 lakh, the rent of its farmhouse at Mehrauli area where Shahiruddin’s wife stays is around Rs 7 lakh.

Similarly, the company has been giving monthly rent of nearly Rs 10 lakh for the residential complex in Delhi’s Defence colony, where two directors Khalik Saha and Mir Tahiruddin stay, followed by Rs 3 lakh for another office at Mahim area in Mumbai. It has also another flat in Bhubaneswar’s posh area Chandrasekharpur.

“Besides, the company’s MD and directors used to stay in five-star hotels on their business/holiday trips to metros and overseas and own many luxury cars including BMW and Lancer. What is shocking is that they used to spend the hard-earned money of poor and unsuspecting people of the country to enjoy a lavish life,” the sources added.

Even as the CB sealed the registered office, so far GRIL’s accounts have not been frozen and it is alleged that the company has been running its business as usual in all other states despite the cases registered against it in Odisha. It had been doing monetary transactions through Axis, ICICI, HDFC, SBI and United Bank in Jaleswar.