May 17, 2013

Deposit and despair - Frontline


TROUBLE does not seem to end for the Mamata Banerjee-led Trinamool Congress government in West Bengal.

The collapse of the chit fund company Saradha Group is one of the biggest financial scandals to hit the State and may well be the ultimate undoing of Mamata Banerjee’s government. The Trinamool Congress, which completes two years in power in May, will find it next to impossible to disown its close ties with the tainted organisation or provide a plausible answer to the righteous indignation of lakhs of gullible investors, including a sizable section of urban and rural poor, who constitute much of the party’s support base. Though the extent of loss to the investors is not known, some estimates state that the group may have collected more than Rs.20,000 crore through its various deposit-collection schemes in West Bengal, Assam, Odisha, Tripura, Jharkhand and Bihar run through its 160 companies.........

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