Another IT firm vanishes with employees’ security deposits

More than 300 employees left in the lurch

A fly-by-night firm that set up shop seven months ago wound up overnight, leaving its employees poorer by lakhs of rupees.

The HAL police are looking for the chief executive officer of the Omega Group, which hired graduate engineers after extracting Rs. 50,000 to Rs. 1 lakh from them as a deposit. The CEO is on the run, along with several senior executives.

The company, based in Belandur near Ecospace on the city’s outskirts, offered job placements for fresh engineering graduates after training them. It even offered stipends to the employees during the training period, giving them appointment letters and ensuring placement in IT majors after training.

Abhimanyu Kumar, a BE graduate from Annamalai University, told

The Hindu he had been promised an initial stipend of Rs.10,000. “There are more than 300 trainees apart from the teaching staff and administration department.”

The trainees got the promised stipend regularly till last month. But on Friday, when they turned up for work as usual, they got the shock of their lives as they found its doors closed and senior personnel missing.

Protest

When their efforts to contact them went in vain, the staff staged a protest in front of the company and some employees went to the HAL police and filed a complaint of cheating. The police detained some senior faculty for questioning.

The city has seen several tech companies of dubious antecedents dupe their employees thus in the recent past.