Rs 500 Cr Chit Fund Scam In Odisha: HC Relief For ‘Shadow’ Actor Naseer Khan

Cuttack: The Orissa High Court on Monday granted conditional bail to Bollywood actor-producer Naseer Khan, who had grabbed headlines for his alleged involvement in a chit-fund scam amounting to Rs 500 crore, in an Enforcement Directorate (ED) case.

He is currently lodged in Jharpada jail in Bhubaneswar.

Khan is accused of duping depositors, who invested in Fine Indisales Private Limited, a chit fund company in Balasore district in which he was a board director. The firm had allegedly collected over Rs 578 crore from nearly 2.40 lakh people across the country.

In July 2009, Balasore police busted Fine Indisales, one of the first major chit fund fraud in the state. The Odisha government subsequently handed over the probe to Crime Branch (CB), which arrested Khan on October 20, 2009. He was, however, released on bail later. The Crime Branch sleuths had then suspected that money collected through fraudulent means by his firm was invested in the film ‘Shadow’ in which Khan, a visually-challenged person, played the lead role. He was also the producer of the film. The money was transferred to the account of the film’s production house Great Entertainment.

The CB had also frozen bank accounts of the company with deposits of over Rs 191 crore.

Later, the Supreme Court directed the CBI to probe the case. In 2019, a CBI court here rejected his bail plea and remanded him to judicial custody. The apex court later granted him bail in the case.

The ED had earlier attached movable and immovable assets of Fine Indisales worth over Rs 47 crore in Mumbai and Kanpur in 2014. The attached assets included land and buildings worth Rs 19 crore in Mumbai. Bank deposits of about Rs 28 lakh in some accounts in Kanpur were also attached.

In 2019, the agency also arrested Mohammad Arif, an ex-director of a private entertainment firm in Delhi, for allegedly misappropriating nearly Rs 35 crore that he had taken from Khan in 2009-10.