Chennai: Financier, sons held for usury

Chennai: Popular film financier S. Mukanchand Bothra and his two sons were arrested on Tuesday by the Central Crime Branch (CCB) of the city police on charges of usury after they threatened a hotel owner and demanded exorbitant interest rates for a loan they lent.

Police said that the trio— S. Mukanchand Bothra (57) and his sons, Sandeep Bothra (25) and Gagan Bothra - were arrested based on a complaint from Senthil Ganapathy, proprietor of PRC International Hotels Private Ltd in T Nagar.

Bothra runs a finance company in Sowcarpet and is well known for his run-ins with SRM university chairman T.R. Pachamuthu and other Kollywood personalities. In 2016, the complainant had approached Bothra asking a loan amount of Rs 83.5 lakh to renovate his property, police said.

In the mean time, Senthil had transferred interest amounts in several instalments to Bothra’s bank account for two years. “However, Bothra’s sons had told Senthil Ganapathy that he is required to pay 60 per cent interest and demanded a sum of Rs 4.24 crore from him,” according to an investigation official.

They had also made the hotel owner sign on blank bond papers in which they had the complainant’s property transferred to their names and further threatened him by publishing advertisements in newspaper in which they had mentioned as if they had entered into sale deal agreement with the hotel owner and the sale of the same property to any other person is not valid.

Following this, Senthil Ganapathy lodged a complaint with the Chennai city police commissioner on June 15. After sustained investigations, a CCB team established that the allegations against Bothra and his sons were true and arrested them under different sections of IPC including 420 (cheating), 465 (punishment for forgery) 467 (Forgery of valuable security, will, etc) and 506 (II) (criminal intimidation). Police cautioned the public to not fall prey to financiers and approach banks for loans.