Neighbours recall Piyush Jain’s conspicuous austerity

KANPUR: Piyush Jain, the Kanpur-based perfume businessman on whose premises Rs 177 crore cash was found, surprised his neighbours with his habit of projecting himself as a low-key man.

For instance, he would move around the sleepy Kannauj town on his rickety Bajaj Super scooter, which is parked inside his sprawling house, said his neighbour in the Chipatta locality in Kannauj.

“I never saw him in Kannauj moving in cars like other perfume businessmen do,” the neighbour said.

Or, he would show up at weddings in bathroom slippers made of rubber or wearing shabby clothes, sometimes in pyjamas.

“He isn’t social at all, hardly makes relations or converses in the neighbourhood. When he was in Kannauj, he and others in the family used to keep to themselves,” said another neighbour.

Chipatta, the locality where Piyush’s family has been living for generations, saw their wealth status changing in the last 15 years, as the neighbours and locals put it. The family used to have a two-room house in which Piyush and his two siblings were raised.

His grandfather was into perfumery and father Mahesh Chandra Jain was a chemist, who prepared the perfume compound and passed the formulas on to his two sons Piyush and Ambrish Jain, who launched their company Odochem Chemicals sometime in 2010.

With fortune favouring them, Piyush and his brothers bought two houses and merged them into one. They built it as one of the finest houses in the last seven years with masons coming in especially from Rajasthan. His father and some of the staff members live in the house.

It has been built in a way that people from the adjoining house cannot see inside. At present, the family has four houses, including the one spread over 700 square yards in Kannauj, apart from the one in Kanpur’s Anandpuri locality. The entire action of Directorate General of GST Intelligence (DGGI) has centered on these houses where 34 people have been working non-stop for the past 84 hours.

All the walls, which have more width than the normal ones, were being scanned for cavities through an X-ray machine brought from Lucknow.

Earlier, speculation was rife that family used the houses to hide cash, gold and silver.

In addition, a basement and 300 keys have been found with a currency counting machine, which was used regularly, said an official on condition of anonymity.

When Piyush Jain was asked about his wealth and the huge cash found at his house, he chose not to answer the question while being taken out of the Kakadeo police station in Kanpur.