A fifty-year domestic help set herself on fire yesterday, on learning that her entire savings that she had put in Saradha schemes, could not be retrieved. Since the last week agents and depositors have been knocking at the West Bengal chief minister Mamata Banerjee's door for help.
However, so far state government has not been able to do anything thing apart from issuing a look out notice for group CMD Sudipta Sen. A high level meeting has been slated in the afternoon today to discus the issue.
Sen, who kept a low profile all these days, was in the chit fund business since the 90s but it was 2010 when he shared his first share of limelight when he ventured into the media business. Before that, it was only the ABP group and Times group that people were aware of as media giants in this part of the country.
Sen, within a short period of time launched multiple news dailies and went on to acquire three television channels of Tara. In two years' time, he had around ten media outfits under his company and all of them were allegedly pro TMC and used to telecast/write news which would comfort the state government. Infact TMC MP Kunal Ghosh was headin the editorial department of most of these medi outfits. Ghosh recently, before the chit fund business got busted, resigned from the company's media outfits.
The buzz of the group exiting the business was in the circle since February when many journalist were not being paid their salary for couple of months. But signals were too strong to ignore. One of the employee of English daily of the Saradha said, "We always knew it was on cards. We didn't get our salaries since January and even the provident fund money was not given to us.”
Th editorial department was informed about a week ago of closing down that the last publication of the newspaper would be on March 31. The notice advised them to find other job avenues. Even, at this juncture the depositors and agents had no clue about the whole business shutting down. Market regulator Sebi too had sent out notices to Saradha and authorities had started clamping down on the operations of the chit fund business.
Slowly, the national dailies started reporting about the events and one fine morning on the auspicious Bengali New years' day scenes on the set of Bengali channel Tara Muzik resembled a prime time soap opera, except that these weren't scripted. About 850 employees of the channel had just learnt they had lost their jobs. The owner of the channel, Saradha Group, shut all its media outfits - Bengal Post, Sakalbela, Azad Hind, Tara News, Tara Muzic and Tara Bangla. Now, about 1,300 media persons were jobless in different Saradha media outfits.
This was also the time when the deposits of various schemes of Saradha matured and agents went to collect the same.
The cat was out of the bag now. The agents, who went to collect the found out that all the other Saradha offices across the state were closed and the money they had invested had gone for a toss.
It was discovered later, Sen, before absconding, had written to the CBI stating multiple names who have been demanding money from him. It then became unviable for him to run the business. Political parties have been demanding the government to unveil the names mentioned in the letter by Sen, but so far that has not been done.
Lakhs of agents and depositors are now clueless about their fate. Many of such agents have not gone back to their homes fearing backlash from the depositors.
ALSO READ: Who is Sudipta Sen?
