HYDERABAD: Enforcement Directorate (ED) has attached 52 immovable properties worth Rs 32.37 crore, spread across Telangana and Andhra Pradesh states in the Agri Gold Ponzi Scheme fraud case. Earlier, in December 2020, the ED had attached assets worth Rs 4,109.31 crore in the case.
The present attachment has been done on the identification of new properties during the course of the investigation, making the total value of the properties attached in the case to Rs 4,141.68 crore. The ED initiated a money-laundering investigation based on the multiple FIRs lodged in the states of Andhra Pradesh, Telangana and Karnataka.
The Agri Gold Group led by Avva Venkata Rama Rao, ran a fraudulent Collective Investment Scheme in the guise of real estate business, for which more than 130 companies were floated. The group collected deposits from the general public with a promise of providing developed plots, farm lands or withdrawal at a high rate of return on maturity and pre-term maturity.
Thousands of commission agents were engaged to lure people with various schemes and managed to collect Rs 6,380 crore from 32,02,628 investor accounts. In the end, the gullible investors neither got plots nor did they recover their deposits.
The modus operandi of the scheme of the Agri Gold Group Companies was that they would lure the gullible public to join as depositors in their schemes either directly or through agents under the pretext of real estate deals.
The deposit agreements did not mention either the actual market value of the land or its location or its boundaries or survey numbers or the layout permissions. They tried to paint it as a real estate business, but in reality, it was an unregulated unlicensed collective investment scheme. Further investigation is underway, ED said in a release.