Bizman held in connection with ₹46-crore fraud case

MUMBAI: The Economic Offences Wing (EOW) of the Mumbai police has recently arrested a Delhi-based businessman in connection with a ₹46-crore fraud case.

The arrested accused, Sharad Virani, allegedly helped the prime accused in defrauding a Mumbai-based pharmaceutical material supplier.

The cheating case was registered in 2016 following a complaint lodged by businessman Sanjay Sanghvi.

According to the Sanghvi, two directors of Someel Enterprises

Pvt Ltd—Mitesh Mehta and Sanjay Shah—between April and November 2016 purchased raw materials required for making medicines on a 90-day credit from Sanghvi and 47 other suppliers.

They sold the material to traders in Delhi, Haryana and Indore and misappropriated the sale proceeds.

According to the EOW sources, Shah was arrested after registration of the case, however, Mitesh Mehta fled the country.

The FIR was registered at Lokmanya Tilak Marg police station in 2016 and was later transferred to the EOW for investigation.

The EOW officials recorded statements of directors of 31 companies to whom the accused had allegedly sold the raw material.

The investigation revealed that Virani had through three companies purchased raw material worth ₹57.23 crore without a purchase receipt from Someel Enterprises Pvt and sold it to other firms in connivance with the prime accused.

During interrogation, Virani, however, claimed that he had purchased material only worth ₹3 to ₹4 crore from the prime accused.

Not many years ago, Brihanmumbai Electric Supply & Transport Undertaking (BEST) was widely regarded as an exemplary public bus system in India. In just ten years, the Brihanmumbai Municipal Corporation (BMC) and the BEST management have successfully demonstrated how such a system can be reduced to shambles.

They have dismantled an affordable and reliable transport system, and put in its place an unreliable and unsafe network of buses owned, staffed and operated by various private contractors. The justification has been ‘efficiency’ and ‘viability’ – but the result has been operational and financial disarray.

Everywhere in the city, we can see long queues of commuters waiting for buses, sometimes for hours. Discontinuation of long routes, depleted fleet, diverted buses and failing operations have made travel an unbearable torture for Mumbaikars. Meanwhile, about thousands of BEST employees are without work, because BEST doesn’t have the buses to employ them. To make matters worse, service quality has worsened dramatically. It is important to highlight that these are not problems due to mismanagement, but the predictable outcomes of cost-cutting measures to make private operations profitable.

On February 22, a bus operated by a private company, Mateshwari, burst into flames, gutting the entire bus (third such incident in recent years). The BEST management responded by discontinuing all the 412 Mateshwari buses. It then diverted some of its own publicly operated buses to the Mateshwari routes, instead of replacing them. Similarly, a few months ago, when the contractor -- MP Group -- abruptly shut down its buses, the BEST had no choice but to divert some of its own buses on those routes. The trouble is that BEST has shrunk its own fleet from 4,700 buses in 2011 to a measly 1,691 today –