-The Hoot A huge media conglomerate was built up by a chit fund company which has now collapsed. Can the West Bengal government whose MP was part of the empire disclaim responsibility, asks SAADIA. About 1400 journalists have lost their jobs because a chit fund company's little-known Chief Managing Director ventured to become a media mogul in West Bengal some three years back. Almost every three months, the Saradha Group that had...

-The Economic Times For many, it is a sense of deja vu. Fifteen years ago, the government and India's financial regulators came under fire after hundreds of crores were cleaned up by a few individuals and entities from gullible investors, who were promised fabulous returns from plantation schemes. In the uproar that followed, the government and the regulators sought to palm off the responsibility of regulation of such schemes on each...

-PTI KOLKATA: The West Bengal government has stepped in for damage control after chit fund company Saradha Group went bust reviving memories of the collapse of Sanchayita Investments in the early eighties when several investors and agents committed suicide. Sanchayita collected more than Rs 120 crore in 1980 before its offices were raided and it folded up with only a handful of people getting back a minuscule amount of money. Two main...

-The Indian Express Sahara India, which is already being investigated by market regulator Sebi, has now also come under the scanner of the provident fund department and is amongst the top defaulters of the Employees' Provident Fund Organisation (EPFO) in the country. Five of the group firms including Sahara India Financial Corporation and the former Sahara Airlines are part of the top 50 companies in the country that have defaulted on depositing...

-The Indian Express On Monday, the Bengali new year's day, viewers who tuned into Bengali music channel Tara Muzik witnessed a spectacle never seen before on Indian TV. Anchors of the channel and independent artistes called in to present Barsha Baran, a programme to celebrate the new year 1420, wept copiously on camera while announcing that the channel, facing an unprecedented "crisis of survival", was shutting down. Hundreds of viewers commiserated with...