Sitting amid the blackened remains of his home, 32-year-old Nikesh Gawali carefully broke open a half-melted plastic box with a screwdriver. His hands shook slightly, not out of fear, but out of hope. “I’m trying to find my daughter Aarti’s gold earrings,” he said quietly, still focused on the box. “She’s just five. I got them made recently after months of labour work.” The plastic box, warped and blackened by heat, was one of the few things left from his two-room house on the outskirts of Dhamangaon village . All around him lay ash, broken tin sheets and charred wooden beams. The walls had cracked under the heat and the front room’s tin roof had caved in completely. What remained was a blackened debris all around - almost nothing to suggest a home once stood there. Nikesh earns his living as an agricultural labourer, like many in the village. Work is uncertain and depends on the season. Those earrings weren’t just jewellery - they were a small dream, a reward for his hard work,...
Aggrieved investors of Maitreya Plotters and Structure Pvt Ltd on Monday met Joint Commissioner of Police (Joint CP) Shivajirao Bodkhe and alleged that the company have duped thousands of investors. The delegation have also lodged a complaint at Dhantoli Police Station against the compnay.
Madhusudan and his wife Varsha Satpalkar floated Maitreya Services Pvt Ltd on December 21, 1998. They bagan luring people to invest money in their company and assured good returns. In October 2003, when Madhusudhan passed away, Varsha became the managing director of the company.
In April 2009, the directors floated another company in the name of Maitreya Plotters and Structures Pvt Ltd. They appointed agents who would encourage people to invest in the company and promised returns in either cash or land after maturity of their invested amount. However, a complaint was filed with the SEBI in 2009-10 regarding this company. SEBI began its scrutiny and found out that the company ran a collective investment scheme without following any of SEBI's regulations. The agency banned the company in August 2013 and asked it to return investors their money. However, after the first company was banned in Mumbai, the directors floated another company in the name of Maitree Realtors and Construction Pvt Ltd on September 16, 2013 in Bangaluru. They shifted the investments to this company and continued to take instalments. The directors took care that the receipts resembled the ones of Maitreya.
The company made an investment of Rs 342 crore in 21 companies which they showed were different but in reality were managed by the same directors. The money invested by the investors in the second company was also routed to 2-3 different companies as advance to purchase land from the first company. The investment in the first company was to the tune of Rs1,350 crore and in the second company it was new investment of Rs 818 crore.
The first company had 21 lakh investors which were shifted to the second company without their knowledge and the second company too had an additional 8 lakh investors. The scam came to light after the company failed to repay the investors after the period of maturity of the scheme. The first police case against the company was filed in Nashik on February 5, 2016. Investigations revealed that the company had fixed assests of than Rs 2,000 crore, a holding of 17,000 hectres of agricultural land, land plots in prime locations in almost all major cities in Maharashtra and across eight states.Varsha Satpalkar was arrested by the police. According to the delegation, investors from Nagpur, Bhandra, Wardha, Chandrapur, Gadchiroli and Gondia had invested more than Rs 50 crore in the company. Joint CP assured the delegation of detailed inquiry.
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