6,800 claims in IMA scam settled: Competent authority

As many as 6,800 IMA investors, whose dues were less than Rs 50,000, have been fully paid back.
On Tuesday, the special officer and competent authority (IMA and other KPID cases) said it released Rs 13.26 crore to the bank accounts of 3,400 IMA investors whose claim amounts totalled less than Rs 50,000 each.
This was the second tranche of claims settlement made by the competent in the Ponzi scam that shook Karnataka in June 2019.
In the first round of claims settlement, the authority released Rs 5.5 crore to 3,470 IMA investors whose claims were less than Rs 50,000 each. In all, the authority says it has fully settled the claims of 6,800 investors whose dues were less than Rs 50,000 by sending them Rs 18.8 crore via bank transfers.
IMA, or I Monetary Advisory, was a so-called Halal investment scam that duped thousands of Muslims. The scam went bust in June 2019 after its founder and managing director, Mohammed Mansoor Khan, released an audio message saying he was going to kill himself. Khan had actually fled to Dubai but was later brought back to India. He’s currently lodged in Bengaluru’s Central Prison, awaiting trial in various causes related to the scam.
The competent authority received around 69,000 claims worth about Rs 2,600 crore from IMA depositors. But given that the value of IMA’s seized assets was far lower, a special court trying KPID cases asked the authority to settle the dues only after deducting any returns that depositors had already received from the IMA. While this drastically cut down the amount of the claims to Rs 1,260 crore, it was still not possible for the competent authority to pay all the claims because the value of the IMA’s seized assets was just about Rs 400 crore.
The court then ordered that smaller depositors — whose deposits were less than Rs 2 lakh and whose dues were less than Rs 50,000 — be settled on priority.
On March 7, 2022, the special court confirmed the provisional attachment of the IMA’s immovable properties worth Rs 105 crore and bank balance/DDs worth Rs 23.5 crore, out of which Rs 11.46 crore was seized by the Enforcement Directorate. The authority has approached the special court for ED to get this amount released for paying the IMA depositors. Once that’s done, another 4,000 IMA claims worth less than Rs 50,000 each can be settled, the authority said.
This apart, the authority hopes to pay more depositors in the next two months as and when the IMA’s seized immovable properties are sold in a public auction.