JVG Group boss arrested

Vijay Kumar Sharma, the alleged mastermind behind one of the country's biggest and most widespread cheating cases, the JVG Group scam involving nearly Rs 500 crore (Rs 5 billion), was arrested in New Delhi, police said on Wednesday.

Sharma (42), the chairman-cum-managing director of JVG Finance and Investment Ltd, was apprehended late on Tuesday night in Chirag Delhi area in south Delhi, deputy commissioner of police Anita Ray said.

The company and its subsidiaries had collected nearly Rs 500 crore from thousands of investors by promising to double or treble their money. It had then declared bankruptcy and closed down in 1997 leaving the investors in the lurch.

Sharma was again trying to revive his 'business' and had set up a real-estate firm PSG Developers and Engineers Ltd which was operating in Delhi and Gurgaon for the last three months.

He had also floated another company in Kolkata by the name WBDC apparently to cheat innocent people, Ray said. Sharma was arrested as he was a proclaimed offender in a case registered in Okhla police station in south Delhi.

According to the FIR, Sharma had instigated his supporters to attack a Mumbai police party when it had come to arrest him from his Okhla office on August 18 last year.

He had more than 50 cases of cheating registered against him but had obtained bail in most of these, in some cases even from the Supreme Court.

There were cases against him in more than 10 states, most of them in the cities of Delhi, Mumbai, Kolkata, Ludhiana, Jammu, Dehradun and Patna.