Vadodara travel agent alleges Maria and her friend duped him of Rs 2.11 crore by promising 1,200 cheaper tickets for Haj pilgrims.
Nearly four years after she walked out of jail for abetment and destruction of evidence in the sensational Neeraj Grover murder case, Maria Monica Susairaj is back in jail in Vadodara for defrauding Haj pilgrims.
Maria had hit the headlines in May 2008 when TV executive Neeraj Grover was murdered and his body hacked into pieces in her Malad flat. In 2011, the high court cleared Maria of the murder but sentenced her to three years in jail for destruction of evidence and abetment. Her then boyfriend, naval officer Emile Jerome, is still serving time in the case.
On Thursday, Ahemedabad police arrested Maria, 35, from Vadodara for the alleged fraud, worth Rs 2.11 crore. She was arrested based on the complaint of a Vadodara-based travel agency La-Raib Tours. The owner of La-Raib Tours and Travels, Zaid Ashfaq, said he and his son met the two women at Hotel Royal Orchid in Vadodara where the women introduced themselves as directors of Parapan Group Tours and Travels from Powai.
Zaid alleged that he tied up with the Maria’s agency for cheaper air tickets for 1,200 Haj pilgrims. But the tickets were never produced, the complaint stated. Maria was listed as accused number 5 in the complaint.
Maria’s friend, Paromita Chakraborty and her partner Henry Fernandez, who used to run Parapan Tours and Travels in Powai, and were the main accused in the case.
Maria’s arrest was as dramatic as her life has been so far. The Ahmedabad police had gone to arrest Paromita, but arrested Maria instead.
“Maria Susairaj and Paromita had been evading arrest since June 6. We were trying to find Paromita based on her phone number which was hot listed for tracking. When we found her number active in Naroda, we raided bungalow number A/33 where she was likely to meet advocate Rajkumar Chaumal in connection with the anticipatory bail in Gujarat High Court for the same case. A team of DCB headed by Police Inspector V J Rathod reached Chaumal’s bungalow for Paromita and instead found Maria Susairaj,” said Rahul Patel, Assistant Commissioner of Police (Cyber Cell, DCB), confirming that Maria had reached Vadodara at around 5 pm on Thursday. Paromita, Henry, and all the other accused in the case are still absconding.
Maria, however, told Mirror that she was being victimised. “Since I had not seen Vadodara before, I decided to accompany her (Paromita) for a business trip here last year,” she said.
As per the FIR filed by Zaid (a copy of which is with Mirror), Maria reportedly lured him into giving them a huge commission on the Haj tour package. Hooked, Zaid went to Mumbai to meet the two women again and struck a deal for 1,200 tickets for Haj pilgrims from Vadodara. “Maria charged Rs 17,500 to Rs 18,000 per ticket and handed over the list of tickets booked to us, following which we made the payment. However, three days before the date of travel, Susairaj cancelled all tickets and transferred Rs 2.11 crore into her personal account. The matter came to light when the Haj victims realised the PNR numbers and copies of the tickets were fake and we faced a loss of around Rs 2.68 crore,” the FIR reads.
When Zaid confronted the duo, Maria handed him a cheque of Rs 80 lakh. But the cheque bounced following which Zaid filed a complaint the Vadodara police.
The complaint was filed under Sections 406 (breach of trust), 420 (cheating), 467 (forgery), 468 (forgery for the purpose of cheating), 120B (conspiracy), and 114 (presence of abettor when offence is committed) of the Indian Penal Code.
On June 6, Maria and the other accused approached the Gujarat High Court seeking to quash the FIR. Justice Abhilasha Kumari, who heard the plea and rejected it, granted relief to Susairaj, ordering the police not to arrest her during investigation.
However, Maria reportedly approached the Vadodara Sessions Court in September seeking anticipatory bail that was rejected, prompting her to approach the high court. On Wednesday, her bail plea was rejected.
A ‘confidence trickster’
Maria’s friend and alleged partner in crime, Paromita Chakraborty, was 28 when she was arrested in a case of fraud by the Amboli police in March 2011. Maria Susairaj, who was released after her conviction in July 2011, was her co-inmate for four months. Prison officials confirmed that Paromita had served time at the same time as Maria but did not recollect if the two had bonded during their term. “Paromita was fluent in English and was cordial. She had told us that it was her first offence and we would constantly advise her to leave her time in prison behind and start a new life,” said a prison source.
Officers from Amboli police station who had investigated the case said that Paromita had been living in the Andheri since 2006. Around 2009, she had allegedly got some of her accomplices to pose as income tax officers and raid the home of her landlord. The ‘officers’ then pretended to know Paromita and recognised her as former West Bengal Chief Minister Buddhadeb Bhattacharya’s daughter. Investigators said that this had made her landlord trust her more. “After that over a period of two years, she kept borrowing money from her and many others. There were cases of fraud of around 2.5 crore,” said the officer.
Maria’s partners, and Powai
Paromita and her partner Henry Fernandez had taken a shop on rent in Powai Plaza in 2013, soon after Paromita walked out of jail.
Speaking with Mirror, the owner of the shop, Uday Raj Yadav, said that he was put in touch with Paromita’s partner in the business, Henry through a broker in 2013.
However, the business was reportedly shut down after the duo failed to pay the rent and electricity bills of the shops for four consecutive months.
“Henry approached me through the broker claiming that he wanted to run his tours and travels business in the shop. We signed the contract in November 2013 with the names of Henry and Paromita on the agreement as partners in the business. I have seen Paromita only a couple of times. Henry was the man who used to handle everything for the company,” Yadav said.
Henry and Promita, in a joint partnership, thus began the tour agency, Parapan Group in the shop on the third floor of the Powai Plaza in Powai since November 2013.
Yadav said that as per the agreement, the duo was expected to pay a rent of Rs 34,000. Both Yadav and the broker, Ramendra Singh, maintained that they have never seen or interacted with Maria Susairaj and that they didn’t know who she was.
(With inputs from Ojas Mehta, Hiren Upadhyay and Sunil Mohanty)
Source: MumbaiMirro r.com
