I am a victim of chit fund scam too: Majhi

Bhubaneswar: Odisha Chief Minister Mohan Charan Majhi on Tuesday claimed that he was also a victim of chit fund scams and urged people to be aware of the activities of ponzi firms to save their hard-earned money.

Majhi said this while addressing a function to celebrate the State Level Na-tional Consumers Day here.

“I was also a victim of chit fund scams. Two firms had duped me in 1990 and 2002,” the Chief Minister said, adding that he could not get back his money as the process of recovering the money was too long and too lengthy.

Describing his experience, Majhi said he was influenced by the sweet talks made by the ponzi firm agents and arranged money to deposit in certain schemes. “However, when the maturity period came, I could not find the companies where money was deposited,” he said.

The Chief Minister, however, said there has been a lot of change now as the Centre has formulated and strengthened regulations to stop cheating and duping of consumers. The BJP’s election manifesto, titled “Modi Ka Guaran-tee for Odisha 2024”, promised, among other things, to refund money lost by people who invested in chit fund companies.

Thousands of depositors have lost their money to bogus chit fund companies in Od-isha. At least 44 companies, including Kolkata-based Saradha Group, and Odisha-based Sea-shore and Artha Tatwa groups, were probed by the CBI following a Supreme Court directive in May 2014. The chit fund firms had reportedly collected around Rs 4,600 crore from people in the State over a period of four years.

The previous BJD government, led by Naveen Patnaik, had formed a commission and set up a Rs 300 crore-corpus fund in 2013 to refund the duped small depositors. The commission. headed by Justice M M Das, had identified around 100,000 small depositors, who lost Rs 10,000 or less.