The story began in 1998 when Madhusudan and his wife Varsha Satpalkar floated Maitreya Services Pvt Ltd on December 21.
For the first time, in a financial offence case, the investors who were duped will now get back their money. Passing a historical judgment, the Nashik district and sessions court on July 26, issued orders to repay the depositors' money in the multi-crore Maitreya Plotters and Realtors Pvt Ltd scam.
The story began in 1998 when Madhusudan and his wife Varsha Satpalkar floated Maitreya Services Pvt Ltd on December 21. 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 Rs342 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 Rs818 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 Rs2,000 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.
A team of Economic Offense Wing, Nashik city police guided by police commissioner S Jaggannthan including police inspector Vijay Panhale, senior PI Kolhe, API Giri and other 2-3 staff members raided the premise of company Maitreya Bhavan in Vasai and arrested Varsha Satpalkar.
The team of police along with government pleaders Rajendra Ghumre and Pankaj Chandrakor, then studied the case and produced the main accused in the court. She was awarded 15 days police custody initially. The police then took a stand that the accused could be given conditional bail. The condition being that she will have to transfer money into an escrow account which will be returned to the investors. “Likewise till now we have Rs6.5 crore in the escrow account,” stated Jaggannathan.
On July 26, 2016, the Nashik district and sessions court in its historic judgment ordered that people who have invested in the company should be returned their money. “We are very happy with the judgment as the people will get back their hard-earned money. We also expect that the company will keep on depositing the money to be returned in the escrow account. They may sell their fixed assets to do so,” stated Jaggannathan.
The police have devised a system to return the money of the investors. Initially, those 14,000 persons who have invested the money in the company and have filed a case against it with the police will get their money back.
Other persons who have invested but not filed any case will also get back their money after that. The police have formed a committee including the tehsildar, a representative of the police, that of the company and also of the investors to scrutinise the claims and repay the money through the escrow account by electronic transfer.
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