On the afternoon of April 16, Sunday, a small group of women was found in front of the Crime Branch's Economic Offences office at Pettah in Thiruvananthapuram. Among them were retired BSNL engineers, wives of retired telecom engineers and also their daughters.

There was a subdued excitement, as if these women were about to collect a big prize. In a sense, they were. They were waiting to catch a glimpse of A R Rajeev, one of the two men who had conned them of their hard-earned money. The scamster-in-chief, the 73-year-old A R Gopinathan, a retired BSNL engineer, was jailed on March 9.

One of the women who strained a look inside the CB office came back and announced in a loud whisper: "He's being handcuffed". The women, scattered around the place, quickly swarmed around the porch of the office as if swept together by a sudden wind.

Soon, Rajeev and his accomplice Harikumar were brought out and taken straight to the police vehicle parked outside. "Villain," a woman called out. "Have a happy journey," another said, fuming. The accused were being taken to the magistrate before being remanded in custody.

While his accomplice sat behind the vehicle frantically trying to cover his face, Rajeev left himself exposed. He had a weak one-sided smile that could have meant any of these: scorn or embarrassment.

One of the women told a policeman. "You could not have given us a better Vishu offering." Rajeev and his accomplice were nabbed from Nagercoil by the CB sleuths on April 15, Vishu day.

Boy wonder

Barely five months ago, none of these women had any inkling that Rajeev was busy looting them.

One of the women recalled seeing Rajeev at the office of the BSNL Engineers' Cooperative Society on November 25, 2022, the day the depositors forced the president of the society, the now jailed Gopinathan, to convene a meeting.

"Though I was deeply worried about my money, I felt sad seeing Rajeev. He sat quiet, looking very disturbed by what was happening. I remember feeling concerned for the boy as I thought if things were really bad the society might collapse and he might lose his job. We knew him right when he was 19 or 20. I even told him not to worry," the former BSNL engineer told Onmanorama.

She, like her co-depositors, had badly misread Rajeev. A top CB official told Onmanorama that Rajeev, the society's clerk, alone had accumulated assets worth over Rs 40 crore using the deposits of the society members.

"He owns houses, luxury cars, shops and even shopping malls in Thiruvananthapuram and we had found plots in 18 survey numbers that were registered in his name or in the name of his close relatives," the officer said.

Big boss feat

Rajeev's boss Gopinathan's loot was big enough to make him one of the richest in Kerala. "I don't think he has left any land for others to purchase in Kollam and Thiruvananthapuram districts," is how a top CB sleuth described Gopinathan's real estate operations.

This was said half in jest but it was not way off the mark. By now, 93 properties purchased either by Gopinathan or in the name of his close relatives in Kollam and Thiruvananthapuram have been identified. "We know there are far more, and we are looking," the CB official said.

Bigger than Karuvannur scam

The three-member panel appointed by the Registrar of Cooperative Societies to assess the situation, with their work nowhere near completion, has already identified deposits totalling nearly Rs 230 crore. The Society's account book showed just Rs 20 crore as deposits.

More than 1500 depositors have also been identified. Majority are BSNL pensioners but there is a sizeable number of outsiders, too, especially from the Brahmin community in the Fort area. The society once had its office in the Fort area, near Sree Padmanabhaswamy Temple.

There is no money left in the society's coffers. Gopinathan and Rajeev have scraped it clean, making the plunder the biggest in the history of Kerala's cooperative sector.

The Thrissur-based Karuvannur Service Cooperative Bank scam involved a loss of Rs 130 crore. Here, more than Rs 220 crore has been pilfered.

"In Karuvannur, the problem was the low value of the properties pledged against loans given to favoured people. The CPM-led governing council wrongfully inflated the value of the collaterals. But in the BSNL case, it was direct loot. The president and the clerk took all the money for themselves. There was not even a pretense of collateral or guarantees," a top Cooperative Department official who had probed the Karuvannur scam said.

Money heist: Final episode

The plunder has been going on for over two decades but came to light only towards the end of 2022.

"It was in October 2022 that people started calling up saying that cheques were bouncing. I also came to know that even interest was not being paid. This was hard to believe as this was our own society, created by people like me," said N A Abraham, the state president of Sanchar Nigam Pensioners' Welfare Association.

To verify the truth, Abraham created an imaginary emergency and sought the withdrawal of a portion of his deposit. "Gopinathan told me there was a small problem. But I insisted on getting the money by the first week of November," he said.

When he went to the society to withdraw his amount, there was a huge crowd. "This had never happened before," Abraham said. A clear sign that panic had set in. Abraham called up Gopinathan and asked for the cash. "He asked me to send him my IFSC code and account number," Abraham said.

Soon he realised that the society had run out of cash and funds were being transferred to the accounts of depositors from outside accounts; from bank accounts in Kollam and Parippally and even from Gopinathan's wife's account.

Shocking discovery

A board meeting was convened by the middle of November. Gopinathan declared that the society had deposits of Rs 21 crore and outstanding loans of Rs 19 crore. Since this looked suspicious, the depositors insisted that a committee examine the accounts. Besides the board members, two depositors - Abraham and Santhosh Kumar - were also made part of the committee.

By then, most of the society's records were taken away by the assistant registrar on the basis of certain complaints. "The secretary then told me that there was just one register left. You can go through this if you want, he told me," Abraham said. It was a register that kept the record of loans taken by depositors from their own fixed deposits, titled 'Loan on FD'. Under the society's rules, a depositor can take up to 80 per cent of their FD as loan.

"I went through the names on the register. Most were people I knew very well and I was sure they had no reason to take a loan. As my eyes ran over the names, I came across a most familiar name. My wife's. She is shown as having taken a loan of Rs 8 lakh," Abraham said. The Modus operandi was thus uncovered.

Conman's treasure trove

Gopinathan was looting money from the FDs and showing them as loans taken by the depositors themselves.

He targeted deposits - ranging from a few lakhs to crores - that were perennially renewed by the society members; deposits that did not pose a threat of quick withdrawal. None of these were placed before the board for approval either.

Most of the depositors Onmanorama talked to not only renewed their deposits every year but also did not collect the monthly interest in the hope that the accumulated interest would then, at the end of the year, be added to the principal amount.

"Even when someone wanted to withdraw the money after the due date, Gopinathan would talk them into renewing the deposit for another year without seeming unnecessarily persistent," said D Savithry, a former SBI manager whose husband was a former BSNL employee.

In some cases, Gopinathan had also misappropriated money from the FDs by recording them as having been transferred to a savings bank account. The society has no such SB account and it is suspicious that this had gone unnoticed during the annual audits.

The board members, though secretary K V Pradeep and member P R Moorthy have been arrested, did not bother to check the records and were content to let Gopinathan run the show.

In all, the ad hoc committee with Abraham and Santhosh Kumar as external members found that nearly Rs 6.5 crore was taken out of the FD of depositors. They somehow sensed that this was just a crumb of a large pie Gopinath had gobbled.

Mobilising depositors' army

To arrive at the actual figure, a list of all the depositors had to be compiled. Gopinathan had not kept any such record. For this, BSNL Engineers' Cooperative Society Save Forum was formed with Abraham as the convenor.

The forum held a meeting of depositors - BSNL's serving and former executives and outsiders - and a WhatsApp group was formed. A Google sheet was then sent to all members in the group asking them to enter the money they had deposited, and the loans secured. The members of the WhatsApp Group soon swelled to over 1500 and together they had, the Google Sheet showed, deposited close to Rs 220 crore.

It was by then known that the stolen money was pumped into real estate and also into money lending through firms operated by a close female associate of Gopinathan named Sheeja Manikantan.

In her affidavit in court, Sheeja reveals that she is the niece of a woman with whom Gopinathan had a live-in relationship. Both Sheeja and her husband Manikantan are now in custody.

Sherlock Holmes mode

But last November there was no proof of Gopinathan's operations. "For this we had to get into the Registration Department's website and search for properties purchased by Gopinathan and his benamis," said Umashankar, a non-BSNL depositor but part of the core team of the Save Forum.

This was an exercise that worked on hunches. "We went to places we thought were most likely for Gopinathan to purchase land and property. And then we ran the likely survey numbers on the Registration Department website," Umashankar said.

He did the field work, collected TC (Thiruvananthapuram Corporation) and survey numbers, and other core members like Abraham and Santhosh Kumar did the backend job of scouring the department website for these numbers to obtain the ownership details of these properties.

It was a tortuous process, mostly without luck. Yet, they ended up locating scores of properties purchased by Gopinathan and his 'benamis'.

As 'benamis' the forum had listed the names of people - Gopinathan's wife, his sisters, his nephew, Sheeja Manikantan and her husband - from whose accounts Gopinathan had transferred money to insistent depositors during the October-November panic phase.

Poor clerk's cruel alter ego

Nonetheless, Rajeev's role came as a surprise. Umashankar stumbled upon it.

He was having tea at a small bunk shop at Kaithamukku, a busy commercial hub. Diagonally across the road from the tea stall was a huge house. "I was told it was bought by one Rajeev for Rs 1.5 crore. The details provided by the people at the tea shop established that it was our Rajeev's. Then I was told that the same Rajeev had purchased three big shops along the area," Umashankar said.

Thus the detective work resumed - the same hunt for likely TC and survey numbers and then running these numbers through the Registration Department website - to locate Rajeev's properties.

Rajeev seemed to possess a ruthless streak. As recently as 2020, he tricked a bedridden retired BSNL engineer into depositing in the society. The retired engineer was trying to mobilise money for an organ transplant and had put up 93 cents of his land at Vellayani for sale.

In this case, Rajeev functioned both as a real estate agent and the society's clerk. He facilitated the sale of the property to his 'benami' for Rs 1.50 crore and then convinced the ailing victim to deposit the sale proceeds in the society.

In the place of cash, the bedridden former telecom engineer received a fake deposit certificate showing he had deposited Rs 1.5 crore in the society. Rajeev and his accomplices pocketed the entire amount.

The findings of the forum convinced the authorities of the scale of the scam and a Crime Branch inquiry was ordered.

The CB sleuths, considering their access to government records, could easily identify more properties purchased by Gopinathan and Rajeev and also in the names of their benamis. A top CB official said most of the 'benamis' have confessed to their links.

Simplicity as deception

Gopinathan's seemingly simple lifestyle was his biggest cover. "We never thought him capable of such wrongdoing. My husband had full faith in him," said Savithri, the retired SBT manager. "Moreover, he had never defaulted on interest payments. The society was paying an attractive rate of 9.5 per cent," she said. No one had problems withdrawing deposits either, at least till the middle of 2022.

Things looked so proper that N Jayakumar, another former engineer, transferred his savings from the Kerala Treasury account to the society in the middle of 2021. "The treasury interest rate fell to 5.5 per cent and our society was giving 9.5 per cent. I had always known that the service was excellent," Jayakumar said.

He still considers himself better off. "At least I did not ask close relatives to deposit their hard-earned money in the society unlike many of my friends and former colleagues. In addition to the stress of having lost their savings, they also have to suffer the contempt of close family members," he said.

 

Brahmins' plight

Pensioners like Jayakumar still have their monthly pensions. But for the depositors from the Brahmin community in the Fort area, interest from their FD was their only source of income.

Even the BJP councillor of Fort ward in Thiruvananthapuram Corporation, Janaki Ammal S, had deposited her savings in the Society. "After our daughter's marriage last December we ran up a debt. When I went to the society for my deposit, I was asked to delay the withdrawal," Janaki Ammal said.

It was then she was told of the scam by the other depositors and she rushed to meet Rajeev as he was the only person she knew. "Even at that time what Rajeev told me was to convince others to make more deposits," the BJP councillor said.

Modi and pandemic play spoilsport

For the most part of two decades, Gopinathan's illegal operations progressed without much of a hitch.

"The large number of properties in his possession helped him to quickly raise money in a crisis," a top CB official said. "On top of that, he was lending the money filched from the society at high rates of interest through a finance company run by an associate. So he always had a cash reserve to dip from," the official said.

Demonetisation dealt him the first body blow. It froze land deals. Still, Gopinathan had enough reserves to pay interest and honour the occasional withdrawals.

Soon after, COVID struck, and the real estate sector went into its second winter in quick succession. No depositor had complained even during this phase.

Retirement bonanza

Gopinathan was saved by the BSNL Voluntary Retirement Scheme in 2019. Most of the BSNL executives who opted for the VRS scheme preferred to park their entitlements in the society lured by the high interest rate and prompt and hassle-free service. According to the CB, more than Rs 25 crore fell into the society's kitty.

This windfall fuelled greed. Gopinathan diverted almost the entire money. In the subsequent years, possibly because retirements came down, deposits started to dry up. Cheques started to bounce even as early as January 2021. These were seen as stray occurrences, nothing to worry about. Those who sensed danger began to withdraw their deposits. Others did not see this as a panic run on the society.

Deposits fell but withdrawals grew like never before. By October 2022, the society did not have enough to pay even the monthly interest.

Way out

Now, the only way depositors can get their money back is to invoke the BUDS (Banning of Unregulated Deposit Schemes) Act, 2019. Under this Act, the attachment of properties already identified can be quickly and efficiently carried out.

It is said that many aspects of the functioning of the society, including the diversion of FDs without any records and the continuance of Gopinathan as secretary and president even after retirement from BSNL, make this a fit case to invoke the BUDS Act.