Till recently when someone mentioned Australia, one visualised hopping kangaroos. Now, only emus come to mind and along with it frozen thoughts of striking gold.
Not many in Tamil Nadu even knew that emus existed. But Guru, a little known man from Erode’s Perundurai town has made the tall Australian birds a household name and also a source of misery for an estimated 12,000 families.
Guru gave wings to the financial dreams of people by luring them to become “partners” in Susi Emu Farms promising monthly returns of Rs 7,000 per Rs 1.5 lakh invested for raising half-a-dozen emu chicks. With Guru vanishing, the emus have become mere birds of fantasy conservatively swallowing `100 crore. More emu farms are likely to go the Susi way.
Ironically the essence of scripts for such financial frauds has remained the same since the fictional ‘Malgudi Days’ of R K Narayan. New actors merely enact adaptations to defraud gullible and sometimes greedy investors.
In Narayan’s 1952 work ‘The Financial Expert’ the central character Margayya lured depositors offering absurdly high advance interests. Soon the business went bust and Margayya became insolvent and the depositors lost their money.
“Margayya continues to live on in real life as we have seen in the past two decades. In the early nineties when RBI regulations were weak, ingenious people floated finance companies across Tamil Nadu offering 24% to 36% interests. Players like Anubhav Finance even paid interests through post-dated cheques, then a novelty. Some others offered time share and invested in teakwood trees,” recalled a senior police officer.
During 1996-97, the bubble around these non-banking finance companies burst. “The owners went underground. People who were depending on this money to perform weddings or purchase their post-retirement home were trapped,” he said. In between, a money multiplying scheme where a person was monetarily rewarded for every new depositor enrolled in the chain, went viral, till the High Court banned it. Early this millennium, Multi-Level Marketing (MLM) schemes that worked on the concept of commissions, with none getting to meet its real owners, captured the imagination of people. Japan Life India sold magnetic beds and Gold Quest India, ‘rare’ gold coins through MLM before failing. A few years ago, City Limouzines entered multiple cities luring people to invest in sedans offering fancy monthly rentals entrapping even lawyers, doctors and journalists. Two years ago, the Paazee Forex Trading scam hit Tirupur. The same script in the form of emus has grounded the fortunes of thousands proving that Margayya is immortal.
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