An investor shows his investment certificates outside the office of the economic offences wing in Bhubaneswar. Picture by Ashwinee Pati

Bhubaneswar, June 18: The city today saw several elders defying the scorching heat to stage a protest outside the office of the economic offences wing of the crime branch here.

They were demanding action against a deposit collection company that allegedly cheated them of Rs 4 crore.

These senior citizens alleged that the police had not been taking any step against the deposit collection company, which also had interests in real estate, despite lodging several complaints against the organisation in the last one and half year.

The police did not even help them get refund of their investments, they said.

Tempted by the possibility of buying a house at Batamangala near Puri in the Little Andaman housing project, Rabindra Nath Mohapatra, a retired official of the Fertiliser Corporation of India, had invested Rs 25 lakh in two phases.

But neither did he get a house nor his hard-earned money.

“The firm, Utkal Bharati, had one of our colleagues Biswanath Behera as a managing partner. He lured us into investing in his projects in return for plots and houses at various locations. In his Little Andaman project, he showed us a design where houses will be surrounded by water. As he was a colleague-cum-friend, I invested in his firm without posing any doubts. But now I understand that I have lost everything,” said Mohapatra.

Like Mohapatra, there are 50 such retired employees of the FCI, Talcher, who had invested in this company.

They told The Telegraph that in last one and a half years they had lodged a complaint with Mancheswar police station and met senior police officers, including the then commissioner, but to no avail. They lodged a complaint with the crime branch in this regard in September last year.

“Though more than eight months have passed, the officials here have not taken any steps. We approached the officials several times, but they kept giving us false promises. We decided to stage a protest today outside the office of the economic offences wing,” said a senior citizen.

“It seems the police are just not bothered about us as we are senior citizens,” said another investor. Officials in the economic offences wing however said that they were looking into the complaint.