WINE WOMEN, AND A CHEAT FUND

SCAMSTER A look at the murky and mysterious world of Saradha group founder Sudipta Sen

If you owned half a dozen newspapers and an equal number of television channels in Kolkata, you would be counted among the city’s social elite. If you built a business empire that grows into 160 companies and tens of thousands of crores in revenues in just five years, you would make headlines. You would be known in the corridors of power.

Sudipta Sen was none of that, until the Saradha Group of companies he founded in 2008 went bust earlier this month, risking the lifetime savings of lakhs of small depositors across eastern India, leaving thousands of people jobless and unraveling a murky web of deals involving money marketers, politicians and journalists.

Sen was arrested on Tuesday from a resort hotel in Sonmarg in Kashmir, days after fleeing Kolkata where police had issued orders of his arrest on a complaint against nonpayment of salaries to staff at one of his media companies.

At the core of the crisis is a multilevel-marketing scheme — akin to a ponzi scheme —with which Sen lured gullible, small depositors in rural areas and used that money to expand his business beyond realty to a much diversified portfolio that included education, automobiles and the media.

LOOT, PLAIN LOOT

For the past five years, Sen had been on a roll. The MLM scheme from his flagship company, Saradha Realty, enrolled thousands of sales agents across West Bengal, Assam, Jharkhand and Odisha, helped open 300 offices in these states and brought in more than R22,000 crore in deposits.

The easy money also brought with it all the vices it usually does. By Sen’s own admission, his agents were illiterate and “they only understand money, women and wine and these are their major demands.”

So he filled his ranks with young women, scores of them from lower middle and middle class families. Two floors of the seven-storied Midland Park headquarters of Saradha Group in Salt Lake in Kolkata, housed only women employees. They were his eyes and ears. Some of them were promoted to senior executive positions in short time, sometimes in months. They would often make field visits and announce company decisions.

One such person was Debjani Mukherjee, an airhostess by training who rose from the rank of a receptionist to that of a director in three years. She was Sen’s shadow and was widely seen as the number 2 in the group’s hierarchy. She was with Sen, when he was arrested earlier this week.

Such an operation, which had no sanctity and violated law in many respects, needed social and political protection. That is why Sen chose to invest in media. His first pick was a popular Bengali television channel, Channel 10, which came to be the mouthpiece of Trinamool Congress in the run-up to the 2011 elections.

In 2010, he launched an English newspaper — the Bengal Post, a Bengali daily — Sakaalbela and a Urdu daily — Kalom. Journalists from rival papers were hired from rival publications with generous salary hikes — often twice or more than what they were previously making.

That was, perhaps, the first time, Kolkata came to know of Sudipta Sen. Yet, few had had a chance to meet or see him till date.

A FRAUDSTER’S STYLE

Sen maintained a very secretive and obscure style of functioning. He never allowed to be photographed or his photographs to be published in any of his newspapers or aired on any of his television channels. He was rarely referred to by his name. Most employees would

IN THE END, HE WAS DONE IN BY MONSTERS HE CREATED — GREEDY MARKETING AGENTS WHO MOVED OUT OF HIS CONTROL AND THE BLEEDING MEDIA BUSINESS

call him “CMD Sir”.

Even some of the journalists who had an opportunity to meet him never got to know much about the man. Except that he was a stocky man in his early fifties who spoke broken English and often wore shiny white or blue suits that were badly cut. That he often was surrounded by men who looked like criminals. That he had a fetish for getting the office walls painted in shades of orange and cream and adorned by garlanded pictures of Ramakrishna Paramhans, the 19- century Hindu revivalist, and his much-reverred wife Maa Sarada after whom Sen named his companies.

Ironically though, Sen did everything but confirm to the ideals and values of Maa Sarada.

SEN’S NEMESIS

In the end, he was done in by the monsters he created on both sides — the greedy marketing agents who moved out of his control and the unviable media business that bled him. He also claims to have been blackmailed by politically powerful people with whom he got entangled because of his foray into media.

In his 18-page letter to CBI, Sen provides details of how some of his trusted aides who helped him build the chit fund empire had betrayed him, how they had put in place a software over which he had no control and how the brokers had begun pocketing the money they were raising in the name of Saradha group.

The first sign of trouble surfaced in November-December when some of the agents found it difficult to meet redemption demands because the company was running short of cash. According to Sen, he had sunk thousands of crores into the media business and new deposits were drying up.

“My overall business downfall is due to the media entry, extortion from the above-named persons and blackmail by my own staff and executives,” he wrote in the letter that named several powerful personalities in Bengal’s politics and administration.