Rose Valley properties worth Rs 2,300 crore attached by ED

Kolkata: The Enforcement Directorate (ED) on Thursday attached Rose Valley group properties valued at Rs 2,300 crore across the cou-ntry. Hotels and resorts attached by the central agency includes the group’s properties at Mandarmani, Lataguri and Durgapur in Bengal. The Adrija jewellery shop at Bag-uiati has also been attached.
Probing the Rs 17,000-crore scam, the ED has already attached properties worth Rs 1,900 crore belonging to different companies of the group run by Gautam Kundu.According to sources, while the collection of the group is pegged at Rs 17,000 crore, Kundu had been returning money to investors. The sources said even factoring this in, the total outstanding of Rose Valley was Rs 8,600 crore. A further Rs 3,500 crore — towards commission of agents and interest payments — was paid. ED sources indicated the actual liability of the group, therefore, would be around Rs 5,000 crore. Of it, nearly Rs 4,200 crore worth of property, including Thursday’s seizures, has been attached.
A division bench of justices Nishita Mhatre and Joymalya Bagchi had earlier iss-ued a no-coercion order against Rose Valley Real Estate & Construction Ltd.
“The current provisional attachment order under the Prevention of Money Laundering Act (PMLA) 1994, was issued after this order was vacated,” said an ED official. Armed with the reprieve, the agency on Thursday attached the Rose Valley properties, including hotels and resorts and more than 400 land parcels, measuring around 200 acres in all.
“There was an order from the division bench of the Calcutta High Court about not taking any coercive action against the company. We will see how the agency moved despite that. We have not yet received any formal communication regarding that from the ED,” said Kundu’s lawyer Biplab Goswami.
According to ED sources, the Rose Valley group had been trying to keep the properties under the investigating agencies’ radars by handing them over to different groups. Accordingly, the hotels changed hands from Sun City group to Chocolate group after the ED registered an FIR against the firm, its chairman Kundu and others in 2014. Later next year, ED arrested Kundu.
Agency sources said hotels that had been operational till date will not be closed. “Even in case of firms like Saradha, we have kept schools open. While these hotels will continue to run, we will have a day-to-day monitoring for those properties,” an ED official said.