Kerala - Thiruvananthapuram   

Cheating complaint against Technopark firm

Thiruvananthapuram: As many as 30 persons, most of them engineering and computer application graduates, have approached the city police, accusing the management of a Technopark-based software firm of cheating them of Rs.1 lakh each.

On the basis of their complaints, the Thampanoor police have registered a case (442/2008) of cheating against Harikrishnan, the 28-year-old chief executive officer of Aryan Infoway and Aryan’s Dream Digital and Animation Studio. He is a city resident.

The company has three branches in the city and an office in Bangalore. According to the police, the company recruited over 600 employees, most of them in the past three years, as software engineers from different campuses in Kerala and Tamil Nadu.

Quoting a complainant’s statement, the police said the company had made its employees deposit Rs.one lakh as ‘share investment’ in the firm at the time of recruitment.

The face value of a single share in the company was Rs.100. The firm told its employees that the current value of a company share was Rs.99,900. The police suspect that the firm’s management had exaggerated the share value of the company to win the confidence of its prospective employees.

The firm made its employees sign an undertaking (on a Rs.50 stamp paper) that they would work for the company for a minimum of three years.

The firm had said that at the time of leaving the company after the minimum service period, employees would be paid Rs.99,900 (the value of the company’s share). Any employee who violated the minimum service bond would be paid only Rs.100, the face value, the police said.

New recruits had to undergo a six-month training during which they would be paid Rs.5,000 as stipend. One of the employees told investigators that the training was ‘name sake.’ There were no experienced teachers or adequate training software, he alleged.

After training, the recruits were put on probation for six months, during which period they were given Rs.7000 as salary.

The company paid a ‘trained’ software engineer Rs.10,000 monthly.

The employees said they had been receiving their salary only once every two months for the one year.

The police said they would inspect the main office of the firm at the M Square building at Technopark.

The police said the trouble started when the company closed its offices allegedly without informing its employees.

On September 8, the company had announced a three-day holiday for Onam. The firm celebrated the festival at its Technopark office on September 10. It asked its employees to report for duty on September 14.

The employees started agitating when the company’s offices remained closed even after October 4.

Most of the employees had taken loans or pawned their jewellery to pay the money demanded by the firm at the time of recruitment.

The police said they were trying to locate Harikrishnan who is supposedly in New Delhi to get business for his company. Few employees expect him to be back soon.

The police said that if the allegations raised by the employees were true, the suspected cheating would amount to several hundred crores of rupees. Circle Inspector E.N. Suresh is investigating the case.

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