Leading investment banker and chairman of JM Financial Nimesh Kampani, an accused in the Rs 100-crore Nagarjuna Finance deposits scam, may get relief soon as the Andhra police are planning to drop him and others from chargesheet.
"We are in touch with legal experts on whether to drop the names of the previous directors of Nagarjuna Finance (NFL) as the Andhra Pradesh High Court has set the responsibility of repaying the depositors on the new directors," a senior police officer, who requested anonymity, told PTI here today.
This technically means that the directors of Mahalakshmi Factoring Services (MFSL), which bought NFL in 2000, will come in to the picture now, the police officer pointed out.
Kampani and other NFL directors are under investigation for the Hyderabad-based NFL's failure to return Rs 98.3 crore collected from 85,160 depositors during 1997-98.
The Hyderabad city police, which registered cases against the NFL directors, arrested some of them, including Nagarjuna Fertilisers & Chemicals chairman KS Raju, who later obtained bail.
The police made several attempts to arrest Kampani as he was one of the NFL directors till April 1999, when the non- banking finance company was plunged into the asset liability problem. In May 2009, Kampani returned to the country and approached the AP High Court and got a stay on his arrest till the chargesheet is filed.
However, the filing of chargesheet may not be an easy task as none of the directors of MFSL and some of the directors of NFL are traceable, sources in the police department said.
"All the addresses furnished by the MFSL directors have been found to be fake," the officer said, adding the police are not sure when the chargesheet will be filed.