Odisha: Aartha Tatwa chit fund scam accused Pradeep Sethy attempts suicide in jail

Sethy has been on judicial remand in the Bhubaneswar jail since May 2013 after his arrest by Odisha CID police that initially probed the chit fund companies till the CBI took over the investigations in May 2014 following a SC order. The CBI had already submitted two chargesheets against Sethy, former BJD MLA Pravat Tripathy, former
Advocate General Ashok Mohanty, deputy SP Pramod Panda, Bollywood model coordinator Priti Bhatia, media house owners Madhu Mohanty and Manoj Das, in the Artha Tatwa scam. CBI has estimated that AT group swindled around Rs 1,200 crore from thousands of investors across the state.

In November 2010, Pradeep Sethy, a 32-year-old computer science diploma holder from Ganjam district, had left his sales job at an insurance company to start 9 firms under the Artha Tatwa Group that dabbled cooperative society, housing, infrastructure, insurance, equity management, healthcare, knowledge process outsourcing, information technology, computer hardware products including a laptop brand called Systematix, food products, retail and security.

The group promised everything to its customers including houses at cheap rates in Bhubaneswar, Balasore and Berhampur. The Group, registered under the Companies Act and the Multi-State Cooperative Societies Act, collected money from small investors in Orissa with a promise of high returns ranging from 15 to 20 per cent. Less than a fortnight after he started his company, the state cooperative department named him the ‘Best Young Cooperative Person’.

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By 2012, a year after he started Artha Tatwa, Sethy had risen in affluence. He rode cars, travelled abroad, hosted glitzy parties in Mumbai, invested in real estate in Kolkata, and funded TV serials and Oriya films.

Like Saradha which had a TV channel of its own, Artha Tatwa even planned a TV channel called AT1 before the plot went bust.