Balasore: A special Odisha Protection of Interests of Depositors (OPID) court here Tuesday sentenced the director of a Ponzi firm to five years imprisonment for fraud. Two other employees were also handed three-year sentences each. Judge Biswajit Das of OPID court passed the order after examining the statements recorded by 16 witnesses and 54 documents, special public prosecutor Pranab Kumar Panda said. Panda pleaded the matter on behalf of the Odisha government. The judge sentenced director Krushna Chandra Sahu of ponzi firm ‘Anwesha –Inn India Pvt Ltd’ to five years in prison and also slapped a fine of Rs 2.40 lakh.
In default, Sahu has to undergo an additional two years in prison, the judge ordered. The judge also awarded three years of imprisonment each to branch manager Pranay Kumar Behera and a staff Abhimanyu Mohapatra. They were each slapped with a fine of Rs 10,000.
According to the case diary, ‘Anwesha-Inn India Pvt Ltd’ opened an office at Station Square in this town in 2012-13 and lured people with attractive deposit schemes by promising them a higher rate of interest on maturity. The company’s chief director–cum-chairman was Pradip Poddar while Sahu, Prabhakar Das, Prabodh Kumar Panda were the directors.
Similarly, Pranay was appointed branch manager while Abhimanyu, Dilip Kumar Bhoumik, Pushpal Ray, Anindya Chakraborty and Basant Panigrahi worked as employees of the firm. Among them, Dilip, Pushpal, and Anindya were from West Bengal while the rest were from Balasore and Mayurbhanj districts. The fraud came to the fore after a woman, the wife of Jagannath Barik of Sheikhpatna locality here, failed to get back her deposit after maturity. When she visited the office, she found it closed. The lady by chance met Prabodh on road and narrated her ordeal. The latter took her documents and gave her six cheques from HDFC Bank amounting Rs 7.37 lakh. The cheques, however, bounced when she deposited them in the bank. Left with no option, she complained to the Sahadevkhunta police station, February 28, 2015. Police registered a case and referred the matter to the court.