Bikash Swain, Ranjan Dash sent to jail after Odisha court rejects their bail plea

Reported by Santosh Jagdev
Bhubaneswar, Sep 20:

The Special Chief Judicial Magistrate Court of CBI here today rejected the bail pleas of Odisha chit fund scam accused Bikash Swain and Ranjan Dash and sent them to judicial custody.

The court, it may be noted, had reserved its judgment after hearing the arguments from both sides yesterday on the bail applications of Swain, proprietor of Odia daily ‘Suryaprava’ and Dash, co-founder of the Artha Tatwa (AT) Group and founder of Swastik India Multi-State Cooperative Agency, yesterday.

Swain and Dash were sent back to Jharpada jail where they were lodged yesterday after the court reserved its judgment on their bail petitions for today. Both of them had been produced in the court yesterday at the end of their 14-day CBI remand.

The Counsel for the duo, Sitanshu Mohan Dwivedy had applied for the bail petition before the court yesterday. The CBI counsel Kalicharan Mishra had opposed the bail plea and requested the court to send the duo to judicial custody.

On September 6, the same court had rejected the bail pleas of Swain and Dash and allowed the CBI to take the duo on a 14-day remand to interrogate them in connection with the multi-thousand crore chit fund scam in Odisha.

Both were arrested by the central investigating agency on September 5 after two days of intensive interrogation at the CBI office.

Sources said their arrests were made after CBI found substantial evidence about their complicity in the dubious business transactions of Artha Tatwa (AT).