Two senior Karnataka IPS officers booked in IMA ponzi scam

Bengaluru: Two senior IPS-rank officers of the Karnataka cadre have been booked for their alleged role in the multi-crore IMA ponzi scam that rocked the state last year, a CBI official said on Tuesday.

“We have booked an FIR against 11 accused, including Karnataka cadre IPS officers Ajay Hillori (accused number 2) and Hemant Nimbalkar (accused number 5) under various sections of IPC for their alleged involvement in the IMA ponzi scam,” CBI official R.K. Gaur told IANS from New Delhi over the phone.

Hillori (2008 IPS batch) was Deputy Commissioner of Police (DCP) in Bengaluru-East while Nimbalkar (1998 IPS batch) was the Inspector General of Police in the Criminal Investigation Department (CID) in Bengaluru. “Besides the two IPS officers, former Commercial Street police station Inspector M. Ramesh (accused number 1), same police station’s Sub-inspector Gowri Shankar (accused number 3), CID Deputy Superintendent of Police E.S. Sridhar (accused number 4) and the scam’s kingpin Mohammad Mansoor Khan (accused number 6) have been charged with various offenses, including criminal conspiracy to dupe thousands of gullible investors,” Gaur said.

The other five accused include the directors of I-Monetary Advisory (IMA), whose Chairman Mansoor Khan masterminded the estimated Rs 4,000 crore scam that came to light in June 2019. The IMA head office at Shivajinagar in the City Centre comes under the jurisdiction of the police station where Ramesh and Shankar were posted then (2016-2019). As the ponzi scam in the guise of Islamic banking involved investors in other states with international ramifications, the BJP government had handed over the case to the CBI in August, a month after it surfaced on July 26, 2019. (IANS)

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