Sudipto Sen, the Saradha Group chairman and managing director. File picture

Calcutta, April 19: Sudipto Sen virtually stooped to conquer — bowing readily before those in power, peppering conversations with “Sir” and managing to avoid unwelcome radar screens.

Sen cut such a low profile that the media outlets he controlled were advised not to air or print his pictures. He rarely attended editorial meetings and many of his employees never met him.

It was from such carefully cultivated obscurity that Sen, in his fifties, has emerged as Bengal’s most wanted — after chief minister Mamata Banerjee publicly announced yesterday that a search had been launched for him.

Police have been looking for Sen, the chairman and managing director of the Saradha Group, over a slew of charges ranging from defaulting on repayments to depositors in chit fund schemes to diverting cash deducted from employees’ pay for provident fund deposits.

Claims were flying in the air that state agencies, eager to get to him before central wings do, had already detained Sen. But there was no official word. Late tonight, sources said the state intelligence branch had issued a lookout notice for Sen.

Reports also emerged that Sen had sent a six-page letter to the chief minister, detailing how some Trinamul leaders had been pressuring him for favours.

Few details were available on record about Sen, probably an outcome of his aversion to publicity. But Sen and his reported origins were the talk of Writers’ Buildings today. Several retired officials were jogging their memories of the man whose influence straddled both the Left and Trinamul governments.

This report is based on such accounts and since Sen is on the run, little could be corroborated with him. Only information that matched accounts from multiple sources, who did not want to be named because of the sensitivities surrounding financial matters, is being used in this article.

“He started off as a real estate agent from a small office near the Behala tram depot in the early 1990s. His fortunes rose when he started selling plots of land in and around Pailan. But he hit a gold mine after venturing into the business of chit funds in 2006-07. In seven years, he mopped up not less than Rs 22,000 crore through various group companies,” said a source in the non-banking sector.

A Saradha Group source said Sen belongs to the family of Bhudeb Sen who owned Sanchayani Savings and Investment Company, which had defaulted on payments to thousands of depositors in the early 1990s. Bhudeb was eventually arrested in 1994, and the RBI later ordered the company not to accept deposits from the public.

A police officer echoed the Saradha source. “The Saradha Group owner always tried to rubbish his reported links with the Bhudeb Sen family, probably because he thought that his chit fund ventures would suffer from a trust deficit,” the officer said.

“He got his first lessons on running chit fund operations from Bhudeb,” he added.

Other Saradha Group sources said Sen’s meteoric rise would not have been possible without political patronage, and that he did everything to keep the ruling establishment happy.

A police source said that this was not the first time that complaints had been lodged against Sen — he was apparently accused of selling the same plot to multiple customers in the late 1990s and early 2000s.

“If the complainants were influential people, he would settle the dispute with them. In case he found them weak, he would bulldoze them by flaunting his political connections,” said a South 24-Parganas district administration official.

During Left rule, Sen maintained close contact with prominent CPM leaders and used the proximity to mobilise deposits under various schemes and channel the cash to his real estate business.

Sen, however, touched base with the Trinamul leadership as the winds of change started blowing across Bengal after the 2008 panchayat elections.

The relationship got strengthened in the next few years as the group ventured into the media business and turned its print editions and electronic channels into virtual mouthpieces for the ruling party. Sources in the group said that the foray into the media business was aimed at building trust for the various chit fund schemes run by group companies.

Almost all the group companies — Saradha Construction, Saradha Realty, Saradha Tours and Travels and Saradha Exports — were used to mobilise deposits in rural or semi-urban areas by promising very high returns.

According to a Trinamul leader from Salt Lake, Sen lives in the township and owns two houses.

A senior journalist who had worked with a media outfit belonging to the group said Sen discouraged his editorial colleagues from printing his pictures in the papers or broadcasting his footage on the channels.

“He never attended any editorial meetings and most of the employees did not even know him…. He used to run the entire media business through Trinamul Rajya Sabha MP Kunal Ghosh, the former group CEO,” he said.

With Sen closing down the media outfits, over 1,000 journalists and technicians have lost their jobs.

The glare on Sen has spread to Ghosh, too, as he was the face of the Saradha Group. The Rajya Sabha MP today posted a statement on Facebook distancing himself from the group.

“I was connected with media wing only. I was never connected with any other aspect of the business of the Saradha group,” Ghosh said in the post, adding that he had already resigned from the group.