Cuttack, Jan. 4: The judicial commission investigating the deposit collection scam in the state has taken up the case of about 59,000 investors, who were not included for validation of compensation due to errors in documents.

The Justice Madan Mohan Das Commission will now give an opportunity to these investors, who had submitted the documents while claiming refund of their money, to rectify the errors.

The commission had not taken into account these investors while making a manual inventory of the documents received and cleared about 8.17 lakh affidavits for digitisation. The process of digitisation includes scanning of the affidavits and preparing the database on the investors.

"The commission feels they deserve the chance as they had responded to its notice within the stipulated time. Their documents have already been taken up for scanning as part of the digitisation process," commission secretary Devraj Rout said.

The documents of the 59,000 investors were not considered as they had either not signed them or had made no affidavit in connection with their claim. Many had not named the sham deposit collection companies, to which they had lost their money.

"The commission is already considering the route through which such large number of investors could be notified about the opportunity to correct the errors in their documents," Rout said.

As part of the digitisation process, scanning of all the 8.17 lakh affidavits has been completed, and the process to create the database on investors on the basis of the affidavits is on.

The commission had been assigned by the state government the additional job of identifying genuine small investors, who have been affected by the scam and are eligible for compensation on the basis of affidavits received. After collating the first batch of 26,976 affidavits - verified and found to be correct - the commission has issued notices to 82 companies, where about 6,000 investors had invested up to Rs 10,000. Rout said: "The authorities of these unauthorised deposit collection companies have been issued show cause notice to say why the claims of these investors should not be accepted."

The commission has also fixed January 20 for hearing of the case related to the necessity of a probe on the unauthorised collection of public deposits by the money deposit companies. It had sought the state government's response on a petition filed by Orissa High Court lawyer Pravat Ranjan Dash seeking direction to the government "to identify and detect, how many such illegal organisations are engaged in unauthorised deposit collection".

According to the order, "the petition has sought an inquiry into unauthorised collection of public money, money laundering, money trailing and illegal circulation of money by different persons/companies involved in the activities in violation of the provisions of the Prize Chits and Money Circulation Schemes (Banning) Act, 2002".