A lower court in Jaipur has ordered the special operations group (SOG) of Rajasthan Police to probe the role of Union Minister for Jal Shakti and Jodhpur Member of Parliament (MP) Gajendra Singh Shekhawat and his wife Naunad Kanwar, among several others, in the ₹884-crore Sanjivani Credit Co-operative Society fraud case that was unearthed in end-September last year.
Additional District Judge No. 8 Pawan Kumar gave the order on Tuesday (July 21) on the basis of a revision petition filed by two complainants from Barmer, who had invested ₹68 lakh in the co-operative society and were denied their dues upon maturity of the sum.
They also demanded an investigation into the role of the minister and his wife in the SOG case registered in August 2019.
Shekhawat’s office said they would go through the contents of the order before making any comment about it.
Ajay Kumar Jain, the complainants’ counsel, said the court accepted the revision petition and ordered the SOG to investigate the role of Shekhawat, Kanwar, and three others, including Mohan Kanwar, Rajendra Baheti and Kewalchand Daglia.
“The revision petition was filed on June 20, which stated that despite the money trail to the personal accounts of minister Shekhawat and his wife, the SOG neither arrested them, nor seized their properties purchased from earnings from the fraud,” Jain said.
{{/usCountry}}“The revision petition was filed on June 20, which stated that despite the money trail to the personal accounts of minister Shekhawat and his wife, the SOG neither arrested them, nor seized their properties purchased from earnings from the fraud,” Jain said.
{{/usCountry}}The complainants -- Ladu Singh and Guman Singh of Barmer – moved court against the co-operative society that had started its operations in 2008 in Barmer and accused it of duping 50,000 investors, including them, of ₹884 crore.
The complainants had cumulatively invested ₹68 lakh in the society, but were denied their maturity dues.
“The SOG had also found in its investigation that Shekhawat and his wife’s companies had a 19% share in the co-operative society and had their hands in the till. The agency has found that money was transferred from the co-operative society to them,” Jain alleged.
The SOG had registered a case against the co-operative society on August 23, 2019, after a preliminary inquiry on the basis of the complaints of unsuspecting investors and found that 50,000 of them were defrauded of ₹884 crore.
The co-operative society’s director Vikram Singh and others were booked under Sections 420 (cheating), 406 (criminal breach of trust), 409 (criminal breach of trust by anybody in the capacity of trust), 467(forgery of valuable security), 468(forgery for the purpose of cheating), 471 (using forged document as genuine) and 120-B (criminal conspiracy) of the Indian Penal Code (IPC), and were later arrested.
In its preliminary investigation, SOG found gross financial irregularities after perusing the balance sheets of the co-operative society between 2009 and 2018, and 214,000 documents of its investors.
“The SOG found that documents between the year 2008 and 2015 were destroyed by those who held positions in the co-operative society. Until June 30, 2019; 214,472 investors had invested ₹883.38 crore, but none of them were paid maturity dues,” the preliminary investigation report had said.
The SOG noted that the society promised unrealistic returns to lure investors, which offered 10% and up to 12% for the fixed deposit (FD) and the daily deposit schemes, respectively.
The promised return was over 40% more than the existing market rate that banks and financial institutions offer for FD schemes.
The Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), the main opposition in the Congress-ruled desert state, is tight-lipped about the court’s order.
“It won’t be prudent to respond to the court’s order in a hurry. We need to go through the content before reacting to it,” said Rajendra Rathore, deputy leader of opposition in the Rajasthan Assembly.