Thrissur: Praveen Rana, the alleged kingpin of a multi-crore investment scam, invested heavily in pubs eyeing a huge profit, but the same backfired due to the prolonged shutdowns during the COVID-19 pandemic and triggered his financial collapse.

A police investigation found that Rana, who was running the chit fund ‘Safe and Strong’, handed over Rs 16 crore to a Kochi-based hotelier, expecting 10 times the return on investment. A bouncer of the hotel entrepreneur who was taken into custody from Bangalore revealed the same, sources said.

Rana had earlier invested in the pubs run by the hotelier in Pune and Mumbai and got big returns on his investment. This prompted him to again divert the money from chit funds to invest in the pub business in Kochi. However, it backfired when the revenue from pubs dried up during the Covid times, which resulted in his downfall, according to the statement given before the police.

When Rana fled from a flat at Chilavanoor in Kochi on January 6 by dodging a police team, the cops initially got hints that he had escaped to Bangalore via Coimbatore. They took the personal bodyguard of the hotelier on the notion that he had helped Rana go underground. It was during his interrogation that the cops learned about the Rs 16 crore investment made by Rana.

Rana has been booked for cheating (Sec 420) and also under the Banning of Unregulated Deposit Schemes Act. He had told the police soon after his arrest that he lost money by financing two films and holding lavish wedding receptions across all the 14 districts in Kerala. However, the investigation team suspects that he had withdrawn the entire money in his bank accounts for safekeeping with benamis. The police are probing the asset details of four aides of the conman.

The police have got over a 100 complaints against Rana with regard to investment fraud.

Praveen Rana aka K P Praveen, a native of Veluthur, Arimpur, in Thrissur, was the Chairman and Managing Director of ‘Safe and Strong’ investment firm. Praveen, who has an MBA degree after Engineering, set up the firm seven years ago as a business consultancy and chit-fund company before he started collecting deposits by promising high returns.