Mumbai:
The Bombay High Court on Wednesday said police officials committed dereliction of duty by failing to take prompt action in the Torres investment scam.
“Nobody has acted with alacrity,” a division bench of Justices Revati Mohite Dere and Neela Gokhale said.
The police “need to be alive to what is happening” and take prompt action so that commoners do not lose their hard earned money, it said.
The court also called for some mechanism to be put in place so that such scams could be avoided in future.
The jewellery company that owns the Torres brand is accused of cheating investors of crores of rupees through a combination of Ponzi and multi-level marketing (MLM) schemes.
The Mumbai police’s Economic Offences Wing (EOW) has so far arrested three persons in the case, two of whom are foreign nationals.
City-based chartered accountant Abhishek Gupta last week moved the HC, claiming to be the whistle-blower in the case and seeking police protection.
The high court last week ordered the police to give security cover to Gupta and sought details of the probe being carried out in the case.
Public Prosecutor Hiten Venegaonkar on Wednesday submitted a probe report to the high court.
He informed the bench that out of the 12 wanted accused in the case, eight left the country before December 30, 2024. Seven of these eight accused are Ukrainian nationals while one is Indian.
“The police know their locations as of now and also their travel history. Appropriate action would be taken,” Venegaonkar said.
The Navi Mumbai police were discreetly inquiring into the scam since October 2024, he added.
The bench then said if information (of the scam) was available, then why prompt action was not taken.
“Somewhere there has been dereliction of duty. Nobody has acted with alacrity. Information was there,” the HC said.
“Now see to it that it doesn’t happen again in future. Now you know the modus operandi. Police need to be alive to what is happening and take prompt action so that people do not lose their money, or there can be some mechanism in the future,” the bench added.
Venegaonkar informed the court that apart from the case being probed by the city police’s EOW, four more FIRs have been lodged in the case by the Navi Mumbai, Thane, Navghar and Mira Bhayandar police.
The high court said all the FIRs shall be probed by the EOW itself.
If the EOW wishes, then a special investigation team (SIT) could be constituted for a probe into the case, it said.
The bench posted the matter for further hearing after eight weeks.
Gupta, who had audited the accounts of Platinum Hern Pvt Ltd, the parent entity behind Torres, in his plea claimed the police were tipped of the alleged scam way back in June 2024 but no action was taken.
More than 3,700 investors have so far approached the Mumbai police with complaints of being cheated and the fraud amount is over Rs 57 crore, as per officials.
According to the complainants, the private firm owning the ‘Torres’ jewellery brand duped them on the promise of attractive returns on investment.
The scam came to light when hundreds of investors gathered at the jewellery brand’s store situated at Torres Vastu Centre building in Dadar (West) early this month after the company stopped paying sums promised to them.
Tazagul Xasatov, a Uzbekistan national, Valentina Ganesh Kumar, a Russian national, and Sarvesh Surve – all senior executives of the firm – have been arrested in the case.
(Except for the headline, this story has not been edited by NDTV staff and is published from a syndicated feed.)
