Kolkata: The long arm of law finally caught up with Pawan Kumar Ruia, former chairman of Jessop and Company and Dunlop India. The companies are controlled by the Ruia Group, whose chairman Ruia was arrested from his Sunder Nagar residence in Delhi by a six-member team of the Bengal CID on Saturday. Ruia, it was learned, was gearing up for his birthday celebrations when the CID team broke open his front door and nabbed him amid stiff resistance from his personal security guards.
Ruia was slapped with sections 403 (dishonest misappropriation of property), 406, 409 (criminal breach of trust) and 420 (cheating and dishonestly inducing delivery of property) of the IPC. Till reports last received, Ruia was scheduled to be brought to Kolkata on a transit remand and would be produced before a court on Sunday where investigators would plead for his custodial remand.
The arrest was made on the basis of an FIR lodged by the Indian Railways at the Dum Dum police station in north Kolkata in October this year. The complaint followed a joint inspection of Jessop’s now mothballed factory, an engineering company which manufactured railway wagons, by the Railways and Bengal CID. It was found that raw material and components worth nearly 50 crore rupees missing from the factory shades. The material was allegedly supplied by the Railways to Jessop for wagon manufacturing but the final product was never delivered.
Challenging the FIR, Ruia had already moved a petition before the Calcutta High Court. The hearing which was scheduled to take place on Monday may now have been rendered redundant in the wake of the arrest. The accused had, however, secured favourable orders previously from the same court in two other cases pertaining to alleged theft of assets from Jessop’s closed factory. While refusing to stay the CID probe into the complaint against Ruia, the high court had previously asked the police not to take any “coercive” measure against the industrialist as long as he cooperated with the investigation.
The Jessop factory shades witnessed several occurrences of fire in the recent past, which were alleged to be acts of arson and “criminal conspiracy” by the company’s management. Ruia reportedly skipped four summons issued by the CID prior to his Saturday’s arrest and led the investigating agency to argue before court that he was “not cooperating” with its officers.
The Ruia Group had acquired Jessop in 2003 from the Union government under its disinvestment programme. The factory shut down indefinitely in 2014, and earlier this year Mamata Banerjee had announced that the Bengal government would take over both Jessop and Dunlop.
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