Mumbai Crime: Clerk and two peons arrested in City Limousine scam

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The Mumbai police on Sunday arrested a clerk and two peons working for a government liquidator appointed by the Bombay High Court in the multi-crore City Limousine scam for allegedly trying to clear compensation claims in the names of bogus victims.

The arrested accused are Keshav Satpute, additional divisional clerk and Gopal Bagul and Santosh Chavan, both peons, who were named in a 2016 FIR in the scam registered by the Azad Maidan police. Twenty-six more were booked, including one Ramdas Yadav from Sangli district.

The scam dates back to 2007 and 2009, when the Economic Offenses Wing (EOW) registered two cases against M/s City Limousines (India) Ltd and M/s City Realcom India Ltd. The two City Group companies had allegedly duped over 70,000 people across the country by promising unrealistic returns on their investments.

Liquidator appointed
In December 2010, the HC ordered the appointment of a liquidator to attend to victims' claims. In 2012, Pankaj Shrivastav, the liquidator sent notices to 20,000 investors, asking them to produce documents to process their claims.

In July 2016, according to sources from Mumbai police, Yadav, who hails from Sangli, filed an e-mail complaint with the liquidator against Satpute, Bagul and Chavan, alleging they had been extorting him and 25 other investors for a year. He said that under the law, they were supposed to file a claim from 2015, but the peons told them they would get more money by filing claims from 2013.

Conniving 'victims'
Yadav had claimed the peons and the clerk extorted a total of R5.54 lakh from the 26 investors to get the sanction letters required to pull off this con, but all of them did not get the sanction letters. However, when the liquidator's office conducted an inquiry, they found that Yadav and the other 25 had never invested money in the scheme and were making false claims. They also found out that the clerk and peons were in on the whole con.

Later on, based on the complaint of government liquidator Pankaj Shrivastav, the accused were booked under relevant sections of the Indian Penal Code for cheating, forgery and criminal conspiracy. "We have arrested three officials on Sunday and they will be produced before the court. More arrests are likely as many accused have been named in FIR for forging their documents," said Manoj Kumar Sharma, deputy commissioner of police (zone 1).

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