Bhubaneswar, Nov 2 (PTI) The Economic Offences Wing (EOW) of Odisha police arrested a man for his involvement in a Rs 12 crore cheating case, a police official said on Thursday.

The arrested man Pankaj Kumar Parida is an MBA and a director of Armada Bazar Pvt Ltd.

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The company floated various schemes to open marts and awarded franchises for investments ranging from Rs 20 lakh to Rs 5 crore with the assurance of high returns. After collecting more than Rs 12 crore from Odisha between February 2022 to January 2023, the company neither ran the marts nor gave the franchise promised to the investors. The firm did not return the money to the investors, he said.

The official informed that the company has also defrauded the investors of states like Jharkhand, Jammu & Kashmir, Gujarat, New Delhi, Madhya Pradesh, West Bengal, Assam, Maharashtra other than Odisha in the same manner.

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The EOW has seized laptops, mobile phones, money receipts and other documents and is continuing its investigation, the official added.

(The above story is verified and authored by Press Trust of India (PTI) staff. PTI, India’s premier news agency, employs more than 400 journalists and 500 stringers to cover almost every district and small town in India.. The views appearing in the above post do not reflect the opinions of LatestLY)