The CBI has filed a supplementary chargesheet against 27 accused, including three private companies, in connection with the Pearls Group scam case in which close to 5.50 crore investors were cheated of about ₹60,000 crore.
Among those arraigned are the 11 accused persons the agency arrested from Delhi, Chandigarh, Kolkata, Bhubaneshwar and other places on December 22. While 14 of them are functionaries of the Pearls Group, one is a chartered accountant and seven are businessmen.
The three companies have been identified as Pearls Infrastructure Projects Limited, ARSS Infrastructure Projects Limited and Jain Infraprojects Limited.
The CBI had registered the case against two flagship companies of Pearls Group, PGF Limited and PACL Limited, its then head Nirmal Singh Bhangoo and others, on February 19, 2014, following a preliminary enquiry initiated on the Supreme Cout’s directive.
According to the agency, investment schemes were launched to lure people from many States into making investments on the promise of lucrative returns. As it turned out, thousands of crores were raised by issuing bogus land allotment letters. However, most of the land parcels were either non-existent, government owned or not sold by the owner.
More than 23 lakh commission agents were roped in and of them, over 1,700 were top-level field associates. Several of them used to get monthly commission in lakhs of rupees for bringing in investors.
Later, on the direction of the High Court of Punjab & Haryana, the accused wound up the scheme but launched another to collect money that was used to repay the previous investors. Funds were diverted using shell entities and about AUD 132.99 million was also invested in Australian companies.
In January 2016, the agency had arrested Mr. Bhangoo, Sukhdev Singh, Subrata Bhattacharya and Gurmeet Singh and filed a chargesheet against them in April 2016.