Praveen Rana aka KP Praveen, 37, the prime accused in a chit fund scam in Kerala was arrested from Pollachi on Wednesday, January 11. He is the Chairman and Managing Director (CMD) of Safe and Strong Business Consultants Private Limited, involved in a Rs 150 crore investment fraud case. The police, who had been searching for him for the past week, found him hiding in a quarry in Devarayapuram of Pollachi disguised as a monk. He is accused of swindling money from depositors by offering exorbitant interest rates of up to 42% for their investments. The case was registered by Thrissur West police after it was found that his company had been taking deposits even after the expiry of its licence.
According to the police, Praveen recently withdrew more than Rs 60 crore from his account and transferred it to various benami accounts as he suspected that his bank account would be seized. Police sources said that Praveen had called his investors for negotiations in December, but he absconded after that. He called the meeting at a resort he owned in Thrissur. Praveen is said to have set off dogs on the police when they reached the quarry to arrest him.
Praveen is an engineering graduate who also holds an MBA degree and hails from Arimpur in Thrissur district. Praveen has acted in a movie named Choran and also appeared on television shows delivering motivational speeches. Some of his aides were also taken into custody by the police. Praveen also attempted to appoint his driver as the CMD of the company when he was in hiding. The police have seized documents from his office, but they have not yet given an estimate of how much amount has been lost by investors.
The case has been compared to another similar case in Kerala by media reports. In September 2021, Monson Mavunkal, a conman who dealt in the sale of antiques and a social media influencer, was arrested for fraud. The Kerala Crime Branch arrested Monson from his residence in Alappuzha on September 26 after a complaint alleged that he had cheated six people of Rs 10 crore. Monson had close connections and business dealings with celebrities, politicians, bureaucrats and so on. He claimed to have paintings made by Leonardo da Vinci and Raja Ravi Varma, a copy of the Bhagavad Gita which was with Chhatrapati Shivaji, the staff of Moses from the Bible’s Old Testament, the staff of Sree Narayana Guru, the original title deed of the Mysore Palace, the throne of the Travancore king, and many other things. Investigations by the police proved that every one of his claims was fake.