The XII Additional Metropolitan Magistrate on Sunday sent GS Raju, promoter managing director of Nagarjuna Finance Limited (NFL), to 14 days’ judicial remand.
Raju, who till recently was the managing director of Nagarjuna Agrochem Industries, was arrested yesterday at the Indira Gandhi International Airport in Delhi. He was brought to Hyderabad yesterday night by the Central Crime Station (CCS) police. Today being Sunday and the court closed, the police produced him before the magistrate at the latter’s residence, where he awarded two weeks’ judicial remand.
Raju, brother-in-law of Nagarjuna Group chairman and promoter of NFL, KS Raju, was preparing to board a flight to the US when the immigration officials identified him and took him into custody and later informed the Hyderabad police, who have put out a look-out notice for him.
GS Raju is one of the accused in the NFL case that the CCS is investigating into. With this, the police have arrested three people accused in the NFL case, which is facing charges of defaulting on payments to its depositors.
On December 16, KS Raju, and another director PK Madhav were arrested. The police has named 18 people as accused in the NFL case. Madhav, chief executive officer of Maytas Infra, was on the board of NFL when it raised deposits from the public.
The court had sent KS Raju and Madhav to judicial remand till December 29 and later extended it by another 14 days till January 12. The bail pleas moved by the two earlier have been rejected. The company is making efforts to file a bail petition again in a couple of days for the two.
NFL, a non-banking financial institution, set up in 1982, collected deposits worth hundreds of crores including Rs 98.3 crore from Andhra Pradesh through its 52 branches in the country. Of this, deposits worth Rs 23.02 crore matured on December 31, 1999, but the company defaulted on repayment of matured deposits. The defaults began when the company could not recover Rs 130 crore from about 58 borrowers.
The NFL depositors approached civil courts, police stations and consumer fora and filed cases against NFL directors. Nearly 600 warrants issued by courts across the country are pending against them.