Calcutta, March 25: The meteoric rise of Gautam Kundu and Rose Valley, a relatively small firm operating out of Tripura with some business stake in Bengal, began when his elder brother's car fell into a lake, killing his entire family.

Kajal Kundu, who established the company in 1997, and his wife and son were on their way to Guwahati from Agartala when the unexplained accident killed them in 2003, following which Gautam Kundu took over the firm.

Gautam Kundu hardly looked back since then.

Kajal Kundu sold insurance for more than a decade before launching a collective investment scheme in the rose plantation sector in 1997 under a company named Rose Resorts and Plantations.

Two years later, the company applied to market regulator Securities and Exchange Board of India (Sebi) for an approval but was denied a licence.

The company wound up in 2003, the year he died.

Under Gautam Kundu's supervision, the company changed track and launched another scheme under the name of Ashirvad. He expanded the business to Bengal, Odisha and the northeastern states.

The scheme solicited investors to deposit money with the firm as booking amounts for plots. After a particular period, the investors had the option of taking back the money with interest or the delivery of land.

However, hardly any investor - many of whom came from humble backgrounds - was aware of the details of the schemes floated by the company. They were just promised a hefty return, which beat rates offered by banks and post offices.

According to Sebi, Rose Valley's cash collections leapfrogged from 2006-2007 onwards. From a meagre Rs 3.75 crore collected between 2005 and 2006, the company mopped up Rs 1271.98 crore by 2009-10.

This prompted the then Left Front government's director of the economic offences investigation cell to write to Sebi on December 7, 2009, seeking an investigation.

The collection ballooned to Rs 2016.32 crore by March 31, 2011, shortly before Trinamul came to power.

In January 2011, Sebi barred Rose Valley Real Estate and Construction Ltd from raising money. By that time, Gautam Kundu, known for his flashy lifestyle - he is one of the few in Calcutta to own a Rolls Royce - had ventured into hospitality.

The seeds of this business were sown in the middle of the last decade, when Rose Valley set up one of the largest hotels in Mandarmani.

Thereafter, the company claimed to have bought properties across India, starting from Calcutta (Chrome Hotel) to Durgapur, Siliguri, Midnapore, Tarapith, Old Digha, Silchar, Haridwar, Goa, Jaipur and New Delhi.

In 2013, Sebi pulled up Rose Valley Hotels and Entertainments Ltd and barred it from collecting money.

The market regulator found that the company had been running a collective investment scheme under the name of Rose Valley Holiday Membership Plan, for which investors were required to pay monthly instalments for accommodation at the hotels and resorts owned by the company.

The scheme also allowed investors the option of getting back the principal amount and the interest accrued on it on maturity if they did not avail themselves of the accommodation.

The interest rates varied between 11.96 per cent and 17.65 per cent. Around 21.9 lakh investors had subscribed to the scheme, according to Sebi.

Gautam Kundu diversified into other businesses too. Apart from producing films with reputed directors, he owned a Bengali newspaper, a TV channel and a jewellery chain, among other things. Rose Valley was also a lead sponsor for Kolkata Knight Riders.

Gautam Kundu established Rose Valley Media and Entertainment Wing in 2009 as a public limited company to launch "television channels, radio stations and cable networks".

It started with a 24-hour entertainment channel, Ruposhi Bangla, followed by the news channels News Time, News Time Assam, Odisha Time and Khabar 365 Din. In the entertainment space, there was the music channel Dhoom Music and the movie channel Dhoom Cinema.

In 2009, Rose Valley Films claimed to have spent nearly Rs 10 crore on film production. "We started producing Bengali films to detect new local talent," Gautam Kundu had said in an interview to The Telegraph.

Some of the high-profile films produced by Rose Valley Films include Goutam Ghose's Moner Manush (2010) and Shunyo Awnko (2013), Kaushik Ganguly's Laptop (2012) and Shabdo (2013), Anik Dutta's Aschorjo Pradip (2013) and Agnidev Chatterjee's 3 Kanya (2012).

In 2012, Gautam Kundu was one of the few producers who travelled to Singapore for the first Bengali film festival there. He spent most of his time meeting Singapore-based investors regarding his company's film business.

Goutam Ghose had earlier told this newspaper: "Both Moner Manush and Shunyo Awnko were moderately budgeted. Their payments to artistes were better than the general Bengali film standards and their payments to technicians was also far above union rates. That apart, they've never interfered with artistic decisions or dictated which artistes to use."