Bhubaneswar: Chief Minister Mohan Charan Majhi today revealed that he was a victim of the multi-crore chit fund scam in the State. Two companies have cheated him in 1990 and 2002.
While addressing a gathering on National Consumer Day at the Lokseva Bhawan here, Shri Majhi said, “A government and private firm had duped me. I arranged and deposited money but later I did not find the companies…I could not get the money back as the process of recovering was too cumbersome and lengthy.”
Describing his experience, Shri Majhi said he was influenced by the sweet talks made by the ponzi firm agents and arranged money to deposit in certain schemes. “However, when the maturity period came, I could not find the companies where money was deposited,” he said.
He said that he had made lots of efforts under old chit fund law for recovery of his deposit amounts but got no results as the legal process was complex.
Shri Majhi lauded the BJP-led government at the Centre for the amendment of the Chit Funds Act, 1982 in 2019.
“Under the supervision of Prime Minister Narendra Modi, all the loopholes in the law was closed,” the Chief Minister said.
In May 2014, the Supreme Court ordered a CBI probe into the Saradha Group and 44 other chit fund firms for allegedly duping investors. The chit fund firms had collected around Rs 4,600 crore from people in the state over a period of four years.
The previous BJD government had formed a Judicial Commission and Rs 300 crore-corpus fund in 2013 to refund small depositors victim of the chit fund scam. The Commission inquired into the chit fund scam and identified around 100,000 small depositors.
Based on the list, the state government decided to pay all the small investors, who lost Rs 10,000 or less.
So far, around 2 lakh small investors, affected by the chit fund scam in Odisha, have already received their money back after the seizure of cash and auctioning of confiscated properties of several chit fund firms.