The city police, on Wednesday, recovered 6,152 sovereigns of gold jewellery which were illegally repledged by the proprietor of a finance company with four other institutions.
The firm had allegedly duped its customers to the tune of over Rs. 10 crore.
The accused pawnbroker, K. Ganesan, who ran Sri Venkateswara Bankers, was arrested by the Tirupur North police on January 15 following complaints from around 600 customers that he did not return the jewellery they pledged with the firm even after repaying the loan amount obtained. City Police Commissioner N.K. Senthamarai Kannan told reporters that a total of 3,503 gold items like chains, rings and ear studs worth Rs 9.06 crore, which were obtained by Ganesan from his company’s customers and then repledged, were recovered from the four renowned institutions that included a prominent commercial bank. “We recovered it through legal means just before the institutions could go for auctioning the jewellery as Ganesan did not repay the loan obtained from the four institutions against the jewellery pledged.” However, one of the institutions has already auctioned a portion of the jewellery which now needs to be recovered,” he added.
Mr. Kannan said that further investigation would be extended to the four institutions too as the firm did not comply with requisite norms to obtain huge quantity of jewellery for disbursal of gold loans.
He said that the police would be handing over the recovered jewellery to the Judicial Magistrate’s Court-1 in the city and request the court to either form a committee or hand over the further phase of the case to the Economic Offences Wing to facilitate the disbursal f the recovered jewellery to its owners.
S. Loganathan, an auto rickshaw driver, and J. Janardhanan, a textile unit worker, told The Hindu that they pledged the jewellery and obtained loan from Sri Venkateswara Bankers because the firm offered lower interest and flexible repayment norms.
