Kolkata: Dodgy finance company colleagues beat 36-year-old to death

KOLKATA: A 36-year-old man was beaten to death by three of his colleagues - at an unregistered finance company - on their office premises in Tollygunge on Saturday for allegedly cheating the company and some clients by collecting money from them with false promises.
Amit Ranjan Chatterjee, claimed the accused trio, now in police custody, collected around Rs 3.5 lakh from various persons but neither handed over the amount to the company nor returned it to the clients. When confronted, this sparked off a free-for-all, in which he was fatally injured, they told the cops.
Amit's brother, Monoranjan, however, lodged a complaint with the local cops, saying the trio had assaulted Amit "over an issue of a small amount of missing money" that belonged to one of the accused, Debasis Adhikary. Cops say Debasis told them the stolen amount was Rs 500.
The Regent Park police have lodged a case of culpable homicide not amounting to murder and arrested company owner Suman Mondal (26), his staffers Somnath Chakraborty (30) and Debasis (25).
Around 7.40pm on Saturday, the Regent Park cops received information that an unidentified person, with injuries on his body, had been declared dead at MR Bangur Hospital.
The police rushed to MR Bangur Hospital, where they found out that Amit Ranjan Chatterjee, now dead, had been brought in by one Somnath Chakraborty. Somnath told the hospital he had found Chatterjee lying injured in a lane. “Somnath claimed that since Amit needed hospitalization, he took him to the hospital,” said joint CP (crime) Murlidhar Sharma.
The cops soon found out that Amit had been working at Maa Durga Finance Sanjog Pvt Ltd in Nehru Colony for the past nine months. He had come to Kolkata from Suri in Birbhum a couple of years ago and had been staying in Kudghat in south Kolkata. While Suman was the owner of the company, Somnath and Debasis, the other two arrested, were both employees, the cops’ investigation found.
“This Ma Durga Finance Sanjog Pvt Ltd is an unregistered finance company,” said joint CP Sharma. “The company claims that it mainly gives loans to the poor and earns money as interest. The owner claimed that Amit had allegedly collected Rs 3 lakh to Rs 3.5 lakh from various persons in the name of this company, assuring them that he would arrange special loans for them. But he allegedly neither deposited any money at the office, nor did he return it to the people he took it from.”
The accused trio told the cops that they had a huge fight when they confronted Amit over his alleged defalcation at their office, during which, the three rained punches on him. They took him to hospital, but fled when the doctor declared him dead.