D S Kulkarni and his wife Hemanti were produced in court on Saturday (Express Photo by Sandip Daundkar) D S Kulkarni and his wife Hemanti were produced in court on Saturday (Express Photo by Sandip Daundkar) FAR from being happy about the arrest of builder D S Kulkarni and his wife Hemanti, investors of the DSK Group are now asking when and how will they be getting their money back. They are also saying that as and when the money is recovered, the priority of repayment should be given to the direct depositors and not the banks that lent money to the group. The couple, accused of cheating thousands of investors of the DSK Group through various schemes, was arrested late on Saturday and later remanded in police custody. Later, Kulkarni (67) collapsed and fell unconscious and he has now been remanded in judicial custody and shifted from Sassoon General Hospital to Deenanath Mangeshkar hospital. On Tuesday, he will be presented in front of a medical board of the Sassoon hospital, before a decision is taken on where he will be kept. A team of Crime Branch of the Pune City Police had arrested Kulkarni and his wife from a hotel in Delhi in the early hours of Saturday. The Economic Offences Wing of the Pune police is currently probing mainly two types of schemes, through which the the group had taken money from investors. One was of fixed deposits, in which money was taken from depositors in the name of a company from the group and in return, the investors were assured of either monthly, quarterly or cumulative returns and also the principal amount after the maturity period. The other scheme, known as Aadhi Ghar, Nantar Paise (first get the house, then pay the money), under which initially, a certain chunk of the total value of flats was taken from customers and the group then promised to pay the EMIs on the bank loans of the customers till the possession of the property was given. Vaishali Kulkarni, whose family invested over Rs 20 lakh in the fixed deposit scheme, said: “We wonder how there was no system to see that a fraud of this scale was going on. We are thinking of writing to the Reserve Bank of India requesting to probe how the fraud was not detected earlier. There are several senior citizens who have deposited their life savings. We also have concerns about the VIP treatment that these people are receiving after the arrest. The arrest itself took four months to come, after the case was registered.” Another depositor, Rajiv Pandit, said: “We now know that the company in whose name the fixed deposits were taken, did not have RBI permission to do so. Showing these deposits, the group has taken loans from banks. There are reasons to believe that it is much bigger loan fraud than what has come out till now. We also want to tell the authorities that, as and when the money is recovered from the group, we, the depositors should be given priority and not the banks.” Kulkarni has maintained that there was nothing wrong with the deposit schemes and that there was no violation of any RBI rules. RTI activist Vijay Kumbhar, who has been representing depositors on various platforms, said: “The fraud is just not limited to what is being investigated by the police. This is a much larger loan fraud where money has been taken from banks by fraudulent means and these things will have to be probed.” On Monday, the police questioned Hemanti based on the expert audit report revised by them. A police officer said the answers given by her were not satisfactory and she will be interrogated further. DSK in ICU; condition stable Dr Vijaykumar Jagtap, family physician of the Kulkarnis, said: “He was brought to Deenanath Mangeshkar hospital around 8.30 pm on Sunday. He is stable and is being closely monitored. Kulkarni is in the ICU and oxygen is being administered. Reports of MRI, 2D-Echo and other investigations will be presented to the medical board.” According to Jagtap, Kulkarni has been a patient of diabetes and high blood pressure. According to Sassoon hospital doctors, Kulkarni was brought from custody in an unconscious state. While being shifted to Deenanath Mangeshkar hospital, his condition was normal. For all the latest Pune News, download Indian Express App

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