Rose Valley scam: Assets worth Rs 1,250 crore including 8 hotels, 1 Rolls Royce seized

The ED on Thursday attached assets to the tune of Rs 1,250 crore, including eight hotels and a Rolls Royce luxury car, in connection with its money laundering probe in the Rose Valley chit fund scam case where thousands of people were allegedly cheated in West Bengal and Odisha. Officials said the agency issued a provisional attachment order for seizing hotels of the group located in Jaipur (Rajasthan), Port Blair (Andaman and Nicobar Islands), Panaji (Goa), Haridwar (Uttarakhand), Ranchi (Jharkhand), Silchar (Assam) and Kolkata (two hotels) and a fleet of a dozen cars which included a Rs 5-crore worth Rolls Royce.

"The deed value of the attached assets is about Rs 465 crore but the market value of the same is Rs 1,250 crore. The attachment order has been issued," they added. The agency had registered a criminal FIR against the firm, its Chairman Gautam Kundu and others in 2014 under the provisions of the Prevention of Money Laundering Act (PMLA). Kundu was last year arrested by the Enforcement Directorate (ED) from here and he is currently in judicial custody. The agency has earlier issued four attachment orders in this case for assets worth over Rs 500 crore and separate ED charge sheets have been filed in courts in Kolkata and Bhubaneswar.

An attachment order under PMLA laws is aimed to deprive the accused from getting benefits of their ill-gotten wealth. It had, hence, registered a criminal FIR against the firm and its owners in 2014 under PMLA. The ED, under criminal provisions of the PMLA, had earlier attached 2,631 bank accounts of the Rose Valley group containing Rs 295 crore. The group had allegedly floated a total of 27 companies for running the alleged chit fund operations out of which only half-a-dozen were active. It is alleged that the firm had floated the scheme by promising inflated returns on investments between 8 and 27% to gullible investors in various states.

The company had allegedly promised astronomical returns to depositors on land properties and assets and bookings done in the real estate sector. It is alleged that the company had made "cross investments" in its various sister firms to suppress its liabilities towards investors. SEBI had probed the company before ED and CBI registered cases against the group. The ED has pegged the total volume of the alleged irregularities at Rs 15,000 crore.