CBI takes Rose Valley Group chief on 9-day remand

Bhubaneswar: The Special CBI court here on Monday allowed the CBI to take Rose Valley Group chairman Gautam Kundu on a nine-day remand for interrogation.

The central investigating team, which had brought Kundu from Kolkata on transit remand on Sunday, produced him in the CBI Special Court and prayed the court to take him on a 14-day remand but the court allowed only a 9-day remand.

The CBI has included 131 witnesses and 257 documents in the charge sheet. The accused have been charged under sections 120 (B), 420, 409 of the IPC and sections 4 and 6 of Prize and Chits Banning Act.

It may be mentioned that the CBI had filed a preliminary charge sheet against Kundu and three top executives of Rose Valley Group— managing director (MD) Sibamaya Datta and two directors Ashok Kumar Saha and Ram Lal Goswami— on January 7 this year for allegedly cheating thousands of gullible investors of their hard earned money after promising high returns on their deposits.

The company had allegedly duped investors to the tune of nearly Rs 17,000 crore across India.

The company was active in Odisha with 28 branches in almost every district and duped investors of about Rs 500 crore.

The central investigating agency has named three firms – Rose Valley Real Estate & Construction Ltd, Rose Valley Hotel & Entertainment Ltd and Rose Valley Real Estate & Land Bank India Ltd – in its charge sheet.

Established in 1997, the Group had allegedly floated 24 companies for running the alleged chit fund operations out of which only half-a-dozen were active. Like Saradha Group, Rose Valley too has diversified business activities like hotels, entertainment, cinema production etc, most of which had been questioned by SEBI.

The group has been running around 23 hotels at different places across the country.