No respite for IMA ponzi victims; founder out on bail

Hameed Ashraf | NT

Bengaluru: The Bengaluru City Civil and Sessions Court recently dismissed a petition seeking permission to attach property belonging to former minister Roshan Baig in connection with the IMA ponzi scam here. However, around 20,000 victims of the fraud continue to be uncertain of receiving their dues, which they had paid as investment to the company.

Nearly 30,000 investors are reportedly left in the lurch after the Bengaluru-based IMA Group of Companies wound up its operations in 2019. Named as Ilyas-Mansoor Advisory, IMA was established in 2006 and is said to have earned huge profits by investing in gold, clothing and infrastructure.

The company and its sister ponzi companies had lured gullible investors, mostly Muslims, offering higher returns in the name of Halal investment, meaning that the company didn’t take or pay any interest on the invested amount. “I had made an investment a year before the scam surfaced.

I was paid the promised amount for 9 months. However, when the Assembly elections began, the management told me that the inflow of money has decreased and they stopped paying me,” Kashif, a resident of Frazer Town, told News Trail. Even students who had invested in the company, hoping to ease their education expenses, lost all their money.

“My parents had sold a piece of land to invest in the scheme,” said a student from Shivajinagar. “They had hoped that the monthly payback would help with my education expenses. So far, there has been no respite for us,” she added. In 2019, an audio clip, claimed to be from the founder of IMA jewels, Mohammed Mansoor Khan, stormed the city in which the founder said that he is going to end his life because of corruption in the state and central governments.

Later in another unverified audio clip, Khan purportedly named the then MLA of Shivajinagar Roshan Baig and a few others of conspiring against him and duping him to the tune of Rs 400 crore. It was alleged that several other politicians had backed Khan in his business operations. Roshan Baig was arrested soon after the allegations and later released on bail.

Recently, a competent authority had filed a petition at a special court seeking permission to attach properties belonging to Baig in connection with the IMA scam. Judge Sridhara Gopalkrishna Bhat of the 91st Additional City Civil and Sessions Court (a special court constituted under the Karnataka Financial Institutions Protection of Investors Act), which heard the petition, dismissed it.

“The IMA has not identified Roshan Baig as a promoter of the organisation in its annual filing filed with the court. Baig has neither served as a shareholder nor as a director of the firm. He has no direct or indirect control over the company. Therefore, he cannot be considered as the propagandist of the organisation,” the court said.

A protest was held in the city last year by victims of the ponzi scam, alleging inaction on the part of the authorities in recovering their invested money. Later, the protest was withdrawn after Shivajinagar MLA Rizwan Arshad assured them of assistance in the matter.

Last year in April, 6,800 investors whose dues were less than Rs 50,000 each got their money back. The rest have no one but the promoter Mansoor Khan to blame and “curse”, while the founder of the company embroiled in the multi-crore scam is out on bail.