The time has come for laws that make it impossible to float get-rich-fast schemes, and perhaps, alongside, to streamline our coercive taxation regime. As it stands, that punitive regime is only pushing everyone to the greys. How else do people from all walks of life, from those who sell their farmland to migrate to cities to those with unaccounted cash, rush to put their money in risky ponzi schemes like I-Monetary-Advisory run by Mohammed Mansoor Khan? A man with hazy antecedents, who returned from Dubai after a short stint as a jewellery salesman, and who has now disappeared in a blaze of crashing dreams (apparently back to Dubai).
How could such a man have become the repository of people’s faith to such a degree that they gave their life’s savings to his utterly strange ‘profit-sharing’ scheme? That too for over a decade—3,900 people have lodged complaints, some heart-wrenching stories there. The minimum investment was Rs 50,000. The amount, totalled, is astonishing. Much of it seems to have melted into thin air, just like the man, and all the gold and diamond from his ultra-uber multi-floor showrooms.
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The SIT set up by the Karnataka government has got an Interpol red corner notice issued against him. But they might as well be on a ghost’s trail. How he left after cleaning everything out is a mystery, and none of the politicians or top cops he was photographed hobnobbing with are helping solve that. From bitcoins to hawala, from Dubai to South Africa, the scale of the scam has put investigators on a learning curve.
Even if Khan is extradited from wherever he has fled to, will those cheated get back their money? That prospect remains bleak. It’s not as if citizens have not lost money in government-approved investment mechanisms in the past. But people’s faith in charlatans is the ultimate critique of the state.