Cuttack, Feb. 8: Delay in identifying genuine investors in sham deposit collection firms has contributed to slow progress in refunding their money.

The state government had announced setting up of a corpus fund of Rs 300 crore in 2015 to provide compensation to the Ponzi victims. It planned to receive applications from investors for refund of money and repay them by auctioning the attached properties under the Odisha Protection of Interests of Depositors (In Financial Establishments) Act, 2011.

Over the past two years, the special designated court in Cuttack had directed for equal distribution of the sale proceeds from public auction of seven sham deposit collection companies.

Accordingly, the additional district magistrate, Cuttack, who is the competent authority under the OPID Act, 2011, was expected to invite applications from investors of the Ponzi firms and auction their attached properties.

But, Cuttack additional district magistrate Raghuram Iyer conceded that applications had so far been invited from investors of Rose Valley Group of Companies to submit their claims for refund of money.

Iyer said: "Applications received from investors of the other six Ponzi firms will be invited shortly after the panchayat polls are over. The auction process will also resume."

The auction of Rose Valley and Safex Infra India Limited had failed to attract any bidders and a negligible portion of attached properties of the Aastha Group of Companies and the Golden Land Developers Group of Companies had been sold through auction.

Official sources said more than three lakh Rose Valley investors had submitted claims for refund by June 2, 2016. The Odisha Computer Applications Centre is digitising the applications to facilitate the process of identification of genuine investors, the sources said. A senior home department official said the government could not be absolved of delaying in payment compensation on the plea of identification of genuine investors.

"The government in the past two years had received two lists of genuine small investors from the Justice Madan Mohan Das Commission. But not a single one of the investors has been refunded the money," he said.

Commission secretary Devraj Rout said: "The commission has submitted two interim reports - one on May 25, 2016, and another on February 3, 2016 - to the government with lists of 8,632 and 10,790 genuine investors, respectively for payment of compensation."