CONMEN vs COMMON MAN: GOA DROWNS IN SCAMS

PANAJI
Massive levels of cheating and fraud of unimaginable scale, be it the land-grab scam, the ongoing saga of dozens of cases in the jobs-for-cash scam or the more recent financial and banking frauds unearthed in Curchorem and Fatorda, all point to Goa, best known as a tourist paradise is also a haven for conmen of all genders and shades who operate with impunity with the least fear of the law, in effect cocking a snook at the State's establishment.

Grappling with this trio of serious scams -- land-grab scam, jobs-for-case and financial/banking frauds -- all of which have tell-tale symptoms of organised crime, the government is seemingly tottering, badgered by serious charges from the Opposition of alleged complicity of both bureaucrats and politicians in office.

Chief Minister Pramod Sawant, however, denies them all and has been putting up a brave front to claim that the police are doing their job transparently, arresting the accused and investigating everyone involved. He made it a point to state that the men in uniform have been given a free hand and that there has been no evidence of political involvement in the cases or of political interference in the investigations which has come to light in all the cases so far.

However, not many, including the Opposition, are taking the chief minister's claims at face value. Instead, they insist that the scale of the scams betray a hidden political hand and have demanded an independent judicial probe to get to the bottom of it all.

Jobs-for-cash scam
The jobs-for-cash scam, stemming from a serious unemployment problem and the lucre of a rare government job, has left many Goan youth cheated and financially strained. Investigations so far have revealed that the scammers, surprisingly a majority of them local women, took colossal sums of money promising them government jobs which eventually did not materialise.

While the scamsters exploited the desperation for jobs among youth it also has seriously dented the integrity of the recruitment process, what with the investigations netting government officials as accused in a few of the jobs-for-cash cases and one other government official, S Satarkar, going missing before he was found dead after police had been summoned him to join the investigations.

The police have booked and arrested several accused in multiple cases and have also attached vehicles and other assets belonging to them. However, many and Opposition politicians in particular, claim that the government lacks the will to let the police go after the big fish -- politicians.

The argument is that the scale of the scam is such that those involved couldn't be acting on their own without the hidden support of politicians in office holding portfolios controlling the specific departments in which the scamsters had promised the jobs.

White-collar financial frauds in Fatorda, Curchorem
Financial frauds and use of forged documents have increasingly become common in Goa but two recent cases which hit the headlines have come as a shocker for their sheer magnitude.

In the first case, a husband-and-wife duo -- Myron Rodrigues and his wife Deepali Parab -- are accused of luring investors, mostly from Salcete, to park large sums of money with the promise of high returns by investing in the stock markets and other financial instruments.

Instead, the husband-wife duo diverted the money. Let alone returns, the investors haven't even seen a penny from their original investments. The economic offences wing (EOW) of the Goa police claim that over Rs 100 crore were siphoned off thus, over a period of 14 years.

The second case of a bank fraud in Curchorem is even more shocking. Unsuspecting customers, mostly senior citizens, of the Central Bank of India, Curchorem branch, trusted Tanvi Vast with their banking matters being under the impression that she was an employee. In reality, Vast was only a member of an NGO but hung around in the bank as if she were an employee.

Vast, taking advantage of the confidence reposed in her swindled money from their bank accounts and police claim the amounts as of now have crossed Rs 1.3 crore. Seventeen complaints have been registered by the Curhorem police who have arrested Vast and the branch manager Anand Ganpat Jadhav.

In one particular case, Vast not only transferred some five odd lakhs of rupees from the bank account of a senior lady named Rosalina Dias into her own account via net banking, but she also replaced gold ornaments kept in her locker with fake ones and pledged the original jewellery worth Rs 19 lakhs to avail a Rs 30-lakh gold loan from a private lender.

Land-grab in Goa
Cases of land sale frauds had been coming to light off and on in Goa for over two decades. But in recent years, cases by the hundreds have come to light where people have sold land without even owning it, often with the connivance of high-ranking officials, which prompted the government to constitute a Special Investigation Team (SIT) under the Crime Branch and also set up a one-man judicial commission headed by headed by retired justice V K Jadhav,

Interestingly, all that has come out in terms of affirmative action by the government after Justice Jadhav presented his report is a new law enacted -- the Goa Escheats, Forfeiture and Bona Vacantia Act, 2024 -- which in effect empowers the State government to take over properties that have no heirs or rightful claimants.

Investigations into individual cases of fraudulent sale of land, are either in limbo or progressing at a snail's pace and the original rightful owners are yet to get back unencumbered ownership or possession.

Legal reforms and stricter enforcement of rules governing land transactions, meanwhile, continue to remain on the back burner.

The way forward
There's no running away from addressing the issues that have come to the fore as these scams unravelled, either for the government and other stakeholders, including land owners, genuine real estate players and the legal fraternity.

To address issues of land-grab, cash-for-jobs scams and financial frauds in Goa, it goes without saying, will need a concerted effort from the government and law enforcement to foster a culture of transparency and accountability.